Mainline and BPO Partner to Offer Managed Hosting and Co-Location

Published: March 20, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Mainline Information Systems, the Tallahassee, Florida, reseller of the entire portfolio of IBM servers and storage, said last week that it has partnered with BPO Management Services, a business process outsourcing service provider located in Anaheim, California, to offer managed hosting and co-location services to BPO's customers.

BPO Management Services is, as its name suggests, a company that provides outsourced back-office computing functions such as human resources, content management, and finance and accounting; the BP part of BPO presumably means shifting your company from what it is currently doing on your own platforms and re-engineering your processes to use their outsourced services. (How this is different from software as a service, or SaaS, is not obvious to me, and probably not to a lot of other people in IT these days, either.) BPO Management Services is, like Mainline, focused on midrange shops, and the company even offers IT outsourcing services for mainframe, System i, and X64 server platforms; it is these very machines in its data centers that are used for outsourcing other customers' applications that BPO Management Services uses to run its hosted applications that it sells as services. The company has grown quickly in the past few years after being founded in July 2005, and in 2007 its sales grew 86 percent, and the company now has in excess of 200 employees. The company has over 400 clients accessing its services, which are hosted in a data center in Pearl River, New York.

Mainline is a larger organization, with over 400 employees, and has been an IBM business partner for nearly two decades. The reseller is also one of the largest of IBM's resellers, peddling lots of Power-based machinery, and is one of the few resellers IBM allows in the System z mainframe market.

Under the deal announced last week, Mainline is partnering with BPO Management Services' IT Optimization Services division--that's the one that provides outsourcing and managed hosting--so it can be a supplier of iron to the company and so it can also resell those outsourcing and hosting services to customers who do not want to buy their own iron. This deal allows BPO Management Services to expand into the Mainline channel, thereby increasing its reach. The financial details of the partnership were not announced.

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