Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z
July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie
Izzi Software today announced the acquisition of CNX Corp., owner of the Valence suite of Web development tools for IBM i. The deal is the first IBM i-related acquisition for Izzi, which was founded last year with a mandate to buy smaller IBM i and mainframe vendors that typically don’t get M&A attention from bigger players.
CNX is a Chicago-based software vendor and consulting firm founded in 1996 by Richard Milone and Robert Swanson. The two had worked with BPCS (now Infor ERP LX) customers, and developed a product that extended that ERP system to the Web. That product, then called ATOMIC, evolved to adopt the latest JavaScript technologies, which CNX formally launched as Valence in 2008.
Valence, which runs atop IBM i’s Apache Web server, has several hundred direct customers, and over 1,000 customers if you count organizations running under OEM licenses, Milone said. While CNX is profitable, the company needed an infusion of capital to grow. After hearing the pitch from Izzi Software chief executive officer Jennifer Nelson and her business partner Steve Nelson (no relation) and discussing a potential deal, Milone and Swanson concluded Izzi was the right avenue to obtain the capital and scale CNX and Valence.
“We’ve been in business for 29 years, so we’ve had plenty of feelers from other companies that wanted to buy us,” Milone told IT Jungle. “Some discussions never went anywhere, for lots of different reasons. But Jen’s email really showed us that she understood our business and mentioned the product and mentioned some things that she wanted to do with it.”
Soon after founding Izzi Software in 2024, Jennifer Nelson had identified CNX as a company that fit into Izzi’s business plan, which was to acquire successful software vendor with strong IBM i and System Z products that might need a successful plan.
“We were in the infancy of the ColeSoft onboarding, and had lots of activity going on, and so when the time was right, when we were able to come up for air a little bit, resurfaced with conversations with Richard and Rob and take the temperature again to see if they’re interested,” Jennifer Nelson said. “And it just felt like a good fit. They’re good people. We hit it off well, and I felt like the conversations organically evolved over time.”
In particular, Nelson and her colleagues had identified Valence as a product that could use some investment. After CNX launched Valence in 2008, it added several additional components, including a JavaScript library; a set of RPG procedures for integrating various JavaScript libraries with existing RPG apps; and a Web portal framework that provides customers with pre-built navigation and security. CNX also offers several add-ons, such as a low-code development environment called Nitro, as well as a file editor, spool file viewer, and even a 5250 emulator. There’s more that CNX could do with Valence, but not without outside investment.
“We like Valence, the modernization offering,” Jennifer Nelson said. “It’s not just trendy, but common sense for future generations to take forward those business-critical applications. And after chatting with Rich and Rob, we liked their ideas on how they wanted to grow for the future, and it felt like a good opportunity to infuse some investment in there and help take that technology into the future. So that’s how the relationship was born: good offering, good people, good strategic direction with the company.”
Richard Milone is the managing director of CNX Corp.
CNX will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Izzi Software. All of the CNX employees will stay with the company, including Milone and Swanson. CNX customers will benefit from a new customer support system to replace the existing one, which is almost completely manual and ad-hoc at this point.
“When the customer contacts us with support, we’re not going through the administrative overhead of assigning a support ticket. We’re just sort of interacting with them through email or on the phone or on Zoom meetings directly,” Milone said. “But as we scale, we really have to implement formalized support processes. It’s important that we stress to them that it will enhance the process of support, not replace that personal engagement.”
Jennifer Nelson and her partner both worked at Rocket Software for a number of years, and are familiar with running formalized customer support operations. She is looking forward to not only bolstering the customer support operations at CNX, but automating a lot of other back office processes that currently are done by Milone.
Jennifer Nelson is the CEO of Izzi Software.
“More sales, more software engineers for both direct R&D and professional services engagements, tech support personnel that can make sure customers are getting what they need, and a true customer success team to make sure customers are happy,” Jennifer Nelson said, listing off the things that CNX will get as part of the deal. “So it comes with a lot of a lot of upfront support with back-end office support as well. Standardizing accounts payable and receivable, standardizing business and sales ops, standardizing on HR platforms. So nobody’s got to do those things manually anymore.”
Milone, in particular, is thrilled at the change. As a trained physicist, he’s looking forward to sinking his teeth into more technical problems.
“It’ll be an administrative relief for me, personally because, as managing director, I get myself involved in a lot of different things. To the extent that some administrative overhead can be taken off my shoulders, I can engage with customer projects more, which is probably more valuable to the company than me handling the administrative tasks.”
In particular, Milone is looking forward to working on bringing Valence to the System Z mainframe. That may not have been a priority before the Izzi acquisition, but now that it’s part of the strategy, he’s all in.
“That wasn’t really on our radar because we’re just trying to tread water keeping up with the demand on IBM i,” he said. “That sounds like a really awesome project to me. I’d love to work on that, personally.”
CNX is considering other additional development projects. One that they mentioned was potentially a report writer. Since IBM stopped selling and supporting Db2 Web Query, there has been a gap in the market for business intelligence tools, which CNX could help fill.
“Our visions are totally aligned from my perspective,” Milone said. “This acquisition is going to allow CNX to do the things that we want to do with the product, potentially bring it to System Z, add a bunch of new features that haven’t been talked about outside of the internal discussions before. And they so far have been very aligned with that. So from my perspective, I don’t feel like I’m giving up control.”
Izzi is more than happy to let Milone and Swanson lead on the product direction (besides perhaps the mainframe port). “We are not the smart people in the room, and are happy to have those smart people be the vote on which direction the technology goes,” Jennifer Nelson said. “They just tell us where they need the investment, and we can start modeling that in to get going.”
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