Agilysys Opens Innovation Center for IBM Wares in New York City

If you are a company using iSeries applications or a reseller that tries to peddle them in the New York City metropolitan area, be glad you don’t have to pay the rent on this one. Cleveland-based Agilysys last week has announced the grand opening of its Business Partner Innovation Center in the heart of New York–at Five Penn Plaza, to be specific.

The center, which was opened in conjunction with IBM, is just north of Madison Square Garden, which means if you are trying out some new Big Blue technologies, you can catch a hockey game, a basketball game, or a concert, or you can go across the street and spend a lot of dough at the Macy’s flagship store. (Or, you can visit a very good chiropractor I know in the building.)

The center is part of a $150 million investment that IBM ponied up in 2005 to create innovation centers for its hardware and software technologies. These centers allow customers to try out stuff and allow resellers and other business, such as independent software vendors, to port their code to either more modern IBM systems or from other platforms entirely. The New York center opened by Agilysys is part of a multi-million, national effort by that company to deliver new technology to its downstream partners. Agilysys is one of the largest distributors of IBM server equipment, and the iSeries plays prominently in its plans. The company says that the new center is focused on demonstrating storage virtualization, systems management, optimization, business continuity and disaster recovery, information lifecycle management, infrastructure simplification, server consolidation and migration to current and potential customers. IBM’s iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers are installed at the center–which actually has a glass-enclosed data center–as are various TotalStorage products and software solutions from the Lotus, WebSphere, Tivoli, DB2, and Rational brands.