A New IBM i Entity Takes Shape: Power By Fortra

November 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

Attendees of the COMMON NAViGATE conference last week were able to catch a glimpse of a new organization making its way in the IBM i world: Power by Fortra. The entity is not a separate company from Fortra. Rather, it’s a virtual carveout of sorts of all of Fortra’s IBM i products as well as its IBM i-focused employees. And according to Power by Fortra general manager Geoff Fischer, it’s here to stay.

“We’re still a part of Fortra,” Fischer told IT Jungle in a recent interview about Power by Fortra rebrand. “We’re still a business unit within Fortra. Nothing has changed in the way the reporting structure prior or anything else. It’s just we wanted to have our own website. We wanted to make sure that people understood and comprehended the commitment that we have in the platform.”

The name of the commercial entity has changed, although not as many times as IBM changed the name of the platform that the vendor has served. Fortra was founded in 1982 as Help/Systems by Dick Jacobson, who created the first Robot/38 product. Over the ensuing years, Help/Systems created a well-regarded line of Robot utilities to automate tasks like job scheduling, backup and recovery, and system monitoring on the S/38, AS/400, iSeries, System i, and since 2008, the IBM i platform running on Power hardware.

The modern Help/Systems began to emerge in 2008, when it started acquiring other IBM i tool providers following its own acquisition by Audax Group the previous year. Bytware, PowerTech, Safestone Technologies, Skyview Partners, CCSS, RJS, Halcyon Software, Coglin Mill, and the ShowCase BI product from IBM were among the acquisitions.

Around the year 2015, a controlling stake in the company was sold to H.I.G. Capital, which charted a new course for the company. Longtime chief executive officer Janet Dryer retired, and H.I.G. Capital brought in Chris Heim to lead the company. The company dropped the “/” from its name, becoming HelpSystems. More importantly, it changed its strategy, pivoting strongly into security.

From 2018 to late 2022, the company acquired at least 17 security software and services firms. The private firm grew revenues to a reported $800 billion and was serving 30,000 global customers. In 2022, the Eden Prairie, Minnesota company, under the leadership of CEO Kate Bolseth and its private equity owners (TA Associates, Harvest Partners, Charlesbank Capital Partners, and HGGC) decided to rebrand the entire company as Fortra, reflecting the new security focus.

Over the past four years, Fortra has continued to sell IBM i tools, including the Robot line of products and all of the other acquired system management and security tools. But the focus of the company as a whole had clearly shifted to security. This was not a bad business move, as corporate investments in cybersecurity started growing after decades of underinvestment. This underinvestment was documented in the IBM i world by Fortra’s own long-running PowerTech Security survey, as well as its Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey, which identified security as a top concern.

What the company is doing with the Power by Fortra rebrand is recentering some of the focus back on the company’s IBM i products and its IBM i business, which has continued to be strong, according to Fischer, who joined Help/Systems in 2012.

“We’ve done some reflecting as to why we exist as a business, and why we exist is to really grow IBM i through innovation and expertise,” Fischer told us. “It’s all about the people. And we have exactly 170 people within the Power business right now that are focused specifically on IBM i.”

Fischer, who came up through the sales ranks and was the director of sales before taking over the Power business as general manager at the beginning of 2025, wants the IBM i community to know that Fortra understands and respects them.

Power by Fortra General Manager Geoff Fischer

“It’s about providing that innovation to our customer base, to the community, to grow the community,” he said. “So it’s not a change in ownership. It’s not anything to do with that. It’s all about serving our customers, focusing on the platform. We want to make sure that people understand that we do have this team that’s really committed to the platform, that eat, breathe, and sleep Power and do nothing else.”

Folks at the joint COMMON/IBM TechXchange conference last week will get to see the new booth that uses the new Power by Fortra name, as well as the new marketing collateral. The company at some point will roll out a new website dedicated to IBM i.

As Fischer said, there are no changes to the reporting structure. He will report to Fortra’s Executive Vice President of Technology Tim Woodfield, who heads up the technology operating unit within Fortra. The other operating unit focuses on security. In addition to Power by Fortra, the tech operating unit owns the Transfer Anywhere product brand (the former Linoma Software product) as well as robotic process automation, and a few others, Fischer said.

Power by Fortra currently employs 170 people, but Fisher is looking to add personnel to help grow the business. In 2026, the group hired more than 20 people, including IBM Champions, and it’s looking to grow the company even more in 2027.

“We’re doing some really fun things for our customers,” Fischer said. “We’re doing customer advisory boards, we’re doing a lot of working on programs that are going to help with education and bolstering this community. And we’ve brought on a few other net new positions as well that we are confident is very much going to improve the customer experience.”

Power by Fortra will also be rolling out a new TCO calculator that allows IBM i shops to calculate the total cost of ownership of their IBM i installation. That will help IBM i shops better understand how much money they are saving by running on IBM i compared to industry standard computers, Fischer said.

“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “It takes in data, puts together a scoring system and a financial model, and then it produces an executive overview that can be shared with the CFO or C-level executive within the organization.”

People familiar with the IBM i understand the TCO advantages of the platform, but leaders who aren’t familiar with it likely do not, Fischer said. “We want to build awareness and put the tools in the hands of the people in this community to help them improve that,” he said. “And we’re excited about this.”

There is no formal separation between Power by Fortra and the rest of the organization, as Fischer noted. But does the creation of Power by Fortra prepare the Fortra company to someday spin Power by Fortra out as its own independent company?

“I can’t predict the future,” Fischer said when asked that question. “I would say this: We’re focusing on what we can control right now. As part of a larger organization, you can’t control everything. But what we can control is making sure that we’re doing everything within those 170 people to absolutely innovate, grow the community, move it forward.”

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