Wall Street Makes IBM, Sun Strange Bedfellows?
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The details are sketchy, and the two companies are not confirming or denying that something is going down, but the Wall Street Journal broke a story last Tuesday, right smack dab in the middle of the opening session of Sun Microsystems' CommunityOne East developer conference in New York, that IBM was in talks to shell out between $7.4 billion and $8.2 billion to acquire Sun. People familiar with the negotiations, which were apparently still going on as I write this on Thursday afternoon, leaked the fact that there were talks to the Associated Press and Reuters. READ MORE >

Measure Twice, Cut Once Applied to ERP Implementations
by Dan Burger

What does you ERP software do for you? Or if you look at it from the other side, what doesn't it do for you? Most companies continue to make sizable investments in ERP applications, but mysteriously they don't measure their return on those investments. Isn't that a heck of a way to run a business? A soon to be released report from Aberdeen Group examines this dirty little secret, and pulls the rug back on a bit of the dirt that's swept underneath. READ MORE >

UCG Partners with MaxAva, Expands DR and HA Capabilities
by Dan Burger

United Computer Group (UCG), a provider of online backup services, is one of the proponents of managed services for the Power Systems i platform. It has been making progress with a backup and recovery service called VAULT400 since UCG introduced it to the AS/400 market in September 2006. Now it's moved into the high availability arena by partnering with Maximum Availability to offer real-time replication of data--what is called 'hot backup' in the lingo--for companies that require short recovery times. READ MORE >

As I See It: Generation Gap
by Victor Rozek

File this one under 'just when you thought you'd seen everything.' As the millennial generation comes of age, the 76 million children spawned by industrious baby boomers are entering the workforce. But unlike past generations, they are not coming to the workplace alone. They are bringing their mommies and daddies. READ MORE >