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.

Personally, I blame

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.

The survey is based on the survey responses of 168 companies that have ERP projects in various

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.

The addition of Maximum Availability’s *noMAX will provide UCG with a managed solution option for organizations that have a recovery

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.

Reliable sources report that corporate mangers and HR departments are being monumentally annoyed by Boomers who accompany their children to job interviews, review their job offers, intervene on their behalf in salary negotiations, and badger the boss when their nestling fails to be promoted. And they can be irritatingly insistent.

Application development tool maker Business Computer Design has never been shy about its commitment to the AS/400 platform as well as its many progeny, and as application development and deployment technology has changed over time, the company has evolved to take advantage of those new technologies. With PHP, as with past development languages, BCD was on the leading edge in getting the technology deployed on the i platform, and now it is benefiting from that forward-thinking strategy.

In particular, BCD says that its professional services business is seeing a good uptake of PHP-related projects. Exactly how much, Eric Figura, director

Dear Tim:

Thank you for the heads up to the community! However, the solution to the sleeping SATA drives is already out there. The answer to solve the issue you brought to our attention is in the linked page. . . not at the end of the quarter as you indicated; it is a contradiction within the article. I read the entire IBM page and the details, problem, and solution is there at the end of the server list. LOL.

I went to the Seagate site and they have an update since February and have updated all other OEMs.

As rumored, router and switch maker Cisco Systems did indeed jump with both feet into the server market last Monday with the launch of its “California” Unified Computing System. And as I told you last week, those of us in the AS/400 community have a wry grin inasmuch as Cisco is taking a couple pages out of the System/38 and AS/400 playbooks to bring a unified network and server platform together with an integrated system management software stack.

Then again, if you are like me, you are probably more than a little annoyed that IBM had not long since

Here’s another indication that the global economy is bad, aside from the rumor that IBM is trying to buy its archrival, Sun Microsystems. Software powerhouse Oracle, the first of the big Silicon Valley startups, last week announced that it would be giving a dividend to stock holders.

Oracle reported its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2009, ended February 28, and the good news was that despite the economic meltdown, it basically met Wall Street’s expectations. (Like we should give much of a damn what Wall Street thinks after the messes–plural–they got us into. . .

iSeries data protection specialist SafeData wants to help you get your data protected better, and for that reason it has put together a white paper that is aimed as much at the owner or manager of your company as it is aimed at the IT department.

The white paper, which has the unwieldy title Best Bets for iSeries Rapid Recovery with Virtualization: An Executive’s Guide to Affordable IBM iSeries Recovery in 12 Hours or Less, lays out the different levels of availability that are available using its SafeData/HA (recovery in 15 minutes or less) or SafeData/DR (10 hours or

This year is a bit of a mental and emotional challenge as well as being an economic one. And the whiz kids at Gartner make a habit and a business out of trying to say something intelligent about the goings-on in IT Land to help CIOs cope with conditions and their bosses, the CEOs, presidents, or owners.

We are all in a bit of a state of shock absorbing the changes to the economy, our businesses, and our lives. But you have to shake it off and start planning for the future, all the same, says Gartner, which released a