You Are Much More Than Power Systems, And So Are We

April 13, 2026 Doug McMaster

The AS/400 was born in the age of minicomputers, but that was also when the rise of the personal computer started and eventually led to the revolution of client/server distributed computing. Not only was computing shifted to the PCs on our desks, but also out to file servers, print servers, and application servers that ran all kinds of different platforms, including NetWare, SCO Unix, OS/2 Server, rarely a variant of Unix, what would become Windows Server, and more recently Linux.

Eventually, Windows Server and Linux became not only Web infrastructure and application serving platforms but ran relational databases and sometimes did work that might otherwise be run on the AS/400 and IBM i platforms running on Power processors from Big Blue.

Except in very special cases, such as a warehouse management system with real or emulated terminals, most AS/400 and IBM i platforms have existed in a hybrid setting inside the datacenter from the very beginning. These machines and their systems software are the core systems of record for the companies that run them, but there is plenty of important work happening on auxiliary machinery that wraps around the IBM i platform or sits beside it as a peer.

Here is what the situation looks like today according to the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey:

The popularity of Windows Server is down about 10 points from its peak a decade or so ago, but Linux is on the rise and AIX – there really is not much other Unix out there these days, as there was even 10 or 15 years ago – is holding steady, too.

CloudSAFE is a managed services provider that is also a cloud provider, with a sum IBM i heritage that stretches back decades in helping customers manage their infrastructure, cut their costs, and improve their operations both on premises and in the cloud. Historically, Focal Point Solutions Group has acquired multiple companies but chose to retain the CloudSAFE name.

CloudSAFE and its business partners have seen that there are a lot of companies that are not managing their connections to their clouds very well, which includes how it is operated, how it is governed, and even what it costs. Why? In the list of reasons just around IBM i are workload latency sensitivities, highly integrated stacks, and specific throughput requirements – not bursting or scaling driven as much as other workloads. Then, there is the data side of the equation where dependence upon a data warehouse, tie into cloud native apps, and daily imports/exports lead to data gravity and associated costs as an architecture consideration for transforming where the workload runs and data resides including backups.

Because of CloudSAFE’s heritage, our sales and engineering talent provide the same deep consultative and management expertise during discovery conversations with our customers and business partners. CloudSAFE reminds everyone through this process that magic does not occur. The workload moves and some of the underlying server and software vendors will change, but the core capability/availability/etc. is still a business requirement. For example, questions and ownership around core areas aim to keep the teams grounded:

Are the cloud options under consideration as secure as their on-premise environment(s)?
What do the expected cost assumptions include?
Who will handle the migration to cloud and who will manage the environment afterwards?
What high availability and data backup needs to be included?
How much data will move and what is worth keeping versus discarding?
How can your existing security and network requirements be met in this new architecture?

All these answers carry an associated cost for transformation and ongoing management. Therefore, the FinOps part of this is not to be underestimated, and this is where things are perhaps going most wrong and most often with a move to the cloud. FinOps (or Cloud Financial Management) focuses on maximizing business value from cloud spend by aligning finance, engineering, and business teams. At its core, FinOps is not just cost cutting – it is about making better economic decisions in the cloud. And that is why CloudSAFE has spent an enormous amount of effort building FinOps expertise and including it in some of our offerings. CloudSAFE’s experts understand the hybrid cloud issues around transformation and aim to find the correct balance of management and capacity monitoring. As one of our cloud or managed services customers, whether for on-premises server instances, on CloudSAFE’s cloud, or other clouds, we can remove the mystery and focus upon reality.

To ensure the FinOps value is clear all of the following are, or should be, included in a FinOps discussion:

1) Cost visibility and transparency for customers is important to make cloud spending visible, understandable, and attributable.

2) Budgeting and forecasting enables the prediction and control of cloud spending while supporting business growth.

3) Cost optimization is important to reduce any potential waste without harming performance or innovation. What is offered is constantly moving and new, better capability needs to be weighed.

4) On the business side of the equation, a company needs to define, if needed, unit cost and efficiency metrics. This enables value creation to be measured over time.

5) Governance and guardrails need to exist that permit flexible action with the proper policies and procedures in place.

6) Potentially, accountability and chargeback are required in an enterprise for obvious reasons.

7) Anomaly detection and risk management similarly viewed as with security are meant to catch problems early and reduce financial risks. CloudSAFE is constantly updating these conversations with our customers and business partners as cloud capability and offerings evolve.

If customers have Power Systems machines running either IBM i and/or AIX – or even Linux on some partitions as well – on premises, the fact is, those same customers at this point in the 21^st century are going to be somewhere out on the cloud buying and using capacity as well. The questions to ask are:

How are they managing that complexity, and are they dedicating the same management and security resources to it as they are for on premises gear?
Do you have the same cross functional people doing the management?
Do they have someone building a spreadsheet, trying to ensure cost efficiency is a permanent operating discipline?

It can become a significant challenge for any size organization. Customer experience and feedback are the primary reasons we developed our FinOps system, as well as the governance framework that operates alongside it. We want our customers to know they are spending the expected amount of money and capacity costs are based on their predefined requirements. We want them to understand their monthly Amazon Web Services bill, and we want to help them be informed of their utilization across platforms as they carry different costs. Perhaps by moving to CloudSAFE’s virtual X86 capacity, which has been carefully crafted for efficiency.

The fact remains, at many companies, no one really knows the answers to these questions. No one fully knows what is being rented on the clouds and how secure it is – or not. In the case of seasoned IBM i and AIX professionals, if you are asking them to manage the cloud capacity and its security, they may not be wholly suited to the task. It can be the “you don’t know what you don’t know” with current cloud virtualization aspects, and yet your applications and databases are out there running in the cloud. CloudSAFE takes IT hosting and management of end customer environments to heart making the infrastructure resilient and secure, while meeting your requirements.

And, if the business decides to focus on other things, like application modernization and integrating GenAI into your applications, CloudSAFE can also do the same for your on-premises Power Systems and X86 servers running whatever mix of operating systems and systems software you have. Our managed services are built to suit, not cookie cutter. We manage your environments while your business changes and grows. We can give you the white glove service on premises and in the cloud. This is what CloudSAFE strives to excel at, and we look forward to telling you more about what we see in the hybrid world and where we are investing in the coming weeks. Come see us if you make it to COMMON POWERUp 2026.

Doug McMaster is chief executive officer at CloudSAFE.

This content was sponsored by CloudSAFE.

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