Lakeview Technology Partners with Ares Group in France

Published: March 27, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hoping to get some more traction in the market for high availability and replication software in the French market, Lakeview Technology announced last week that it has inked a partnership with Ares Group, a large IT services firm located in France.

As it turns out, Ares is one of the top five distributors of iSeries machinery in France. (Although we don't know it's exact ranking, if it was number one or number two, you would expect Ares to say that, which probably means it is number five.) Ares was established in 1986 and now has 15 branch offices around the country, employing 1,800 people. Some 1,350 of those people are hardware and software engineers who are experts at deploying IT solutions, and that is what has Lakeview excited. Ares has been a public company since 1999 and its stock is traded on the Euronext Paris exchange. The company booked sales of $145 euros in its fiscal third quarter ended December 2005. Ares was founded to chase the opportunity for Unix system sales and integration back when that was a nascent market, and has logically expended into supporting Linux systems as well. And, of course, it is a large iSeries reseller as well. All of these areas of expertise mesh well with Lakeview and IBM's increasingly cross-platform approach with the iSeries platform.