Relion Solutions Launches With A Focus On Customer Service
July 20, 2026 Alex Woodie
Customer service sure isn’t what it used to be. Instead of helpful customer service representatives who pick up the phone before the second ring, you have overgrown phone trees, unhelpful AI agents, and ticketing systems that seem designed to shield customers from companies and companies from customers. You won’t find any of this at Relion Solutions, a new IBM midrange business partner that launched earlier this month with a desire to focus relentlessly on serving the needs of its IBM i customers.
Relion Solutions was co-founded by Heather Dinho and Richie Palma, two IBM i veterans with years of experience in the IBM midrange. The Byron Center, Michigan-based company recently was accepted into the IBM business partner program, enabling Dinho and Palma to begin growing their new business, which will serve IBM i customers nationally.
“We are an IBM business partner reseller for IBM Power Systems, storage, maintenance, renewals,” Palma told IT Jungle in a recent interview. “We will build our service portfolio around pretty much everything from the OS up. So we won’t do any custom application development services, but will help customers take care of the OS layer, and as we grow and scale, we’ll dive into the managed services world.”
Palma cut his teeth on the IBM i server sales as a solution consultant at Arbor Solutions, a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based IBM business partner serving IBM i and AIX. In 2018, Palma joined iTech Solutions, Pete Massiello’s full-service IBM reseller based in Danbury, Connecticut.
Dinho, who is Massiello’s daughter, joined her father’s firm in 2019 as a marketing and special projects manager, before becoming iTech’s director of marketing and operations in 2021. After Massiello sold his company to Service Express in 2022, Dinho continued as the marketing manager, a position she held until September 2025. Palma stayed at Service Express until June of this year.
Heather Dinho (left) and Richie Palma are co-founders of Relion Solutions.
Dinho and Richie both expressed a desire to focus on customer service with Relion. That means making it easy for customers to contact the company, responding quickly to customer calls, and generally just being responsive to their needs.
“I think anytime you go from a nimble company to a large company, it really gives you a reality check of, we’ve lost that nimbleness, we’ve lost the ability to do things quickly, to be able to service our customers, to have those direct relationships,” Dinho said. “We want that nimbleness back. We want to be able to make changes, to be able to do things immediately to service people, not to have to worry about a ticket system, to be able to have your customers pick up the phone and be able to call you.”
As the ranks of IBM business partners have consolidated, the result is that there are a handful of large players left. Service Express has the scale of a $300 million company and is backed by a private equity firm that is helping it to grow through acquisition. The goal with Relion is buck that trend of bigger resellers, and return to the days of smaller resellers that are closer to their customers.
“You’ve seen a massive consolidation in our space, so many smaller boutique shops that just get gobbled up by larger companies,” Palma said. “There aren’t very many of the small boutique shops that are agile and provide good service. And so we saw a space that we could provide that. We’re looking forward to spending the next 20 years just driving value in this space when a lot of other folks aren’t positioned to be able to do that.”
When something goes wrong with an IBM i server, customers just want to get the problem fixed as soon as possible. That is challenging to do when the service provider is spending cycles checking and re-checking the statement of work (SOW) and the standard operating procedures (SOPs) instead of listening to the customer’s needs.
“They don’t want to have to put in a ticket and wait for someone to go pull up the SOW and the SOP and make sure that this is in coverage. They want to get back up. They want to get running. And that’s what we want to be able to do,” Dinho said. “We don’t want to have someone just sitting and waiting while things are going wrong. They want to know, all right, if I’m going to pick up the phone, I’m going to call Relion, I know I’m going to get so and so who is skilled on Power and on i and is able to help me. They’re going to get the best of the best.”
Palma and Dinho currently are ramping up operations at Relion, which includes hiring workers and attracting clients. They already have some clients lined up and are looking to hire employees who have a desire to put customer needs first.
“There’s just a void in the space for an energetic business partner that just wants to service and take care of customers and take care of the folks in the community,” Palma said. “I think energy is important. We have a ton of passion for the platform – we always have – and now we’re adding rocket fuel to it, because it’s our business now.”
There was a saying at iTech Solutions that has stuck with Dinho as she co-founded a new company with Palma.
“I think about this every day,” she said. “We used to say: ‘We’re good at what we do because we love what we do.’ And that’s truly still at the core of this and how we want to grow and how we want this to scale. That’s really the heart of it.”
