Sun Asks ISVs Why They Love Solaris
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's a new year, and it always takes a while for the year to warm up. Aside from some big acquisitions, a few server announcements, and the tanking of the world's stock markets, the news in the IT sector has been thin. So this is a good time for vendors to get in touch with their customers and to reach out to their communities through the press and blogosphere to get a story out there that might not rise above the crackle and roar of a busy week. READ MORE >

Weak Dollar, Services, and Power6 Give IBM a Solid Fourth Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After pre-announcing on last Monday morning that it would have better than expected profits in its fourth quarter, giving Wall Street a helping hand as it tries to climb up the steep cliff it has tumbled off in recent weeks, IBM reported its full and official financial results for the quarter last Thursday afternoon after the market closed and after The Unix Guardian was already on press. This turns out to be one of the best quarters IBM has turned in during the past decade, in terms of both revenue and profit growth. READ MORE >

IBM Aims for Server Expansion in 2008
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past several years, I have ended each work year by attending a server technology conference hosted by UBS, which typically draws the top brass from the major server divisions of the tier one server makers. This year, because of the high cost of putting on the event, UBS decided to not do it. But some of the server makers did attend the Global Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by Lehman Brothers in December. One of them was IBM, and Bill Zeitler, the senior vice president in charge of Systems and Technology Group, had some interesting things to say. READ MORE >

SOA Remains Hard to Define, but Projects on the Rise
by Dan Burger

The concept of service oriented architecture (SOA) remains a slippery fish to grasp. For many people, SOA defies an accurate and meaningful description. Some deny that it is anything new. It can be said that it entails new standards-based ways of tying business processes together, another way of saying interoperability, and that is perhaps its most valuable benefit. Not being able to precisely describe it doesn't stand in the way of people claiming to know it when they see it. READ MORE >