BCS Group to Resell for Halcyon

April 6, 2010 Alex Woodie

BCS Group, a provider of System i high availability expertise, will begin reselling i/OS systems management software from Halcyon Software as the result of a new partnership, the companies announced recently.

BCS Group is a full service provider of business continuity services for IBM i/OS and Microsoft Windows platforms. In addition to helping customers plan their high availability or disaster recovery strategies, the company installs and sets up HA and DR environments, and even manages its customers HA systems, whether they’re at the customer’s site, or one of BCS Group’s co-location facilities around the country.

With its customers’ System i and Windows servers under its watch, BCS Group needed a tool that would automate the monitoring and management tasks. It decided to give that job to systems management utilities from Halcyon Software, the U.K. developer that has been making inroads into the American market–particularly among System i hosting facilities.

The features and functionality of the Halcyon utilities impressed Craig Copeland, the vice president of professional services at BCS Group, and also its owner. “Since we began using the technology, we have simplified the monitoring and management of remote technology, as well as in our management facility,” he states in a press release. “Through the use of the Halcyon technology we expect to accelerate our remote management business.

Halcyon’s i/OS offerings consist of message and job log monitoring and management; a job scheduler; disk space management; spool file management; record and playback (automation); audit journal monitoring; performance monitoring; and management of restricted tasks. For Windows, Linux, and Unix, Halcyon offers the Network Server Suite, which features log management and alerting capabilities. Tasks for all four platforms can be monitored centrally from a single console.

The deal with BCS Group is similar to deals that Halcyon’s U.S. business unit, which is based in Philadelphia, has put together with two other large system outsourcers, Sungard and Network Service Plus.

According to John Dominic, Halcyon’s channel manager in the Philadelphia office, selling systems management tools to co-location operators makes sense, as it lessens the overall cost to the end customer, while boosting management capabilities for the operators of the facilities. “We are very pleased to be working with BCS Group to offer our systems management solutions to its nationwide enterprise clientele,” Dominic says.

In addition to reselling Halcyon’s software, BCS Group has deals with i/OS HA leader Vision Solutions, Windows and Linux HA and DR experts Double-Take Software, and InMage, a developer of DR and continuous data protection (CDP) products for Windows, Unix, and Linux.