As companies become more distributed and less centralized in their operations, the need to spread IT out without adding a lot of capital and resource overhead has become a real challenge. One company is trying to address that need with a $100,000 developer contest to build the best applications for the distributed workforce.
It's interesting what the same thing means to different people. We see it time and again in the Linux world, of course, as the myriad approaches to Linux have created different distros, desktop environments, applications... put something as malleable as Linux and open source software in front of a bunch of really talented people, and you get some really fantastic output.