Sirius Gets Equity Investment from Thoma Cressey
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, when Thoma Cressey Equity Partners takes an interest in something, the private equity firm doesn't waste much time moving. After having acquired two high availability software makers in the System i market within the past several weeks, last Friday the company announced that it would be making an equity investment in another prominent System i vendor: Sirius Computer Solutions. To many, this will be seen as another shot in the arm--or perhaps more precisely, into the balance sheet--for the System i market. READ MORE >

Power6 Ups the Ante for Virtualization, Power Management
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last month, IBM told the world about some of the features that it had built into its future Power6 RISC processors, which are expected to appear in IBM's System p machines around mid-2007 and maybe in its System i machines around that time, or maybe in late 2007 and perhaps early 2008. Big Blue is being a little vague about exactly when Power6 will come out for reasons it has not specified. But the company is being clear that when it does come out, Power6 will be jammed full of improvements. READ MORE >

Interest in WDSc Indicates Small but Steady Change in App Dev
by Dan Burger

One of the reasons applications, such as those developed in RPG and COBOL, are branded as legacy is because most are constructed with non graphical server-side tools that are clunky and slow compared to modern, client-side tools with graphical interfaces and major productivity and functionality advantages. Alternatives to the trustworthy SEU/PDU tools exist. IBM and a long list of its business partners offer these alternatives. And I think it is fair to say momentum is building when it comes to developing modern applications, but it would be an exaggeration to call it anything approaching a groundswell. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Workplace Politician
by Victor Rozek

Politics is a great tree burdened with rotting fruit, and there's nothing like a recent election to remind us of why it can be so distasteful. If political ads are any measure of gravitas, politics is full of brash sound and feigned fury signifying rudeness. Although politics is associated primarily with governance, the term is also used in the workplace, where it describes the backroom and boardroom decisions that impact employees--often adversely--but have little or nothing to do with the actual running of the business. READ MORE >