Abacus Running On Clouds At COMMON, Gives Free Trial

April 8, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may have taken some major changes in technology and culture, but the long-awaited promise of cloudy infrastructure for OS/400 and IBM i workloads is becoming a reality.

Abacus Solutions, which launched an IBM i cloud at last May’s COMMON Annual Conference and Exposition, is back at this year’s COMMON event in Austin with customer Brooks Running Company to tell potential customers all about the benefits of putting their applications out on the Abacus cloud.

Scott Johnson, senior iSeries solutions specialist at Abacus, tells The Four Hundred that the company is teaming up with Brooks to fit prospective customers with a pair of custom running shoes at its COMMON booth. Brooks is a user of Infor‘s Lawson M3 ERP suite, and moved its operations to the Abacus cloud last year.

Johnson says that the cloud business is doing well for Abacus, with it having doubled the number of customers on its cloud in the past year. Moreover, there’s a lot of activity with tire-kickers at the moment, and much of it coming through its partnership with Infor, which was also announced at last year’s COMMON. The company has over 40 different customer environments running in its two data centers (in Marietta and Kennestone in Georgia), and given all the interest in running either homegrown or third-party applications in the cloud, Johnson says that the business could double again this year–or perhaps do even better than that.

To help get customers to give its IBM i cloud a try, Abacus is launching a 90-day free trial for capacity on its cloud service, which can be used for test and development to, say, move applications from i5/OS V5R4, which runs out of support in September of this year, to IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. It is not clear at press time how much capacity Abacus is giving customers to play with on its cloud to give it a whirl.