LightEdge Archives

Thinking About Moving IBM i To The Cloud? Don’t Start With The Quote

August 31, 2026 Josh Patterson

We get asked a deceptively simple question all the time: “What would it cost to move our IBM i environment to the cloud?”

It sounds like a pricing question. Usually, it isn’t. Before we start talking about cores, memory, storage, or monthly costs, there’s a much more important question to answer: Why are you considering cloud in the first place?

Maybe your Power server is approaching a refresh. Maybe your data center contract is ending. Maybe an experienced IBM i administrator is retiring. Maybe your disaster recovery strategy no longer meets the business’s needs. Or perhaps your organization has adopted …
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Lightedge To Start Selling IBM PowerVS to IBM i Customers

June 8, 2026 Alex Woodie

Lightedge, one of the largest private cloud providers serving the IBM i market, recently announced that it is going to begin offering IBM’s public cloud service, Power Virtual Server, to its customer base. The move comes amid solid growth in PowerVS and tough competition in the private cloud business.

Lightedge (formerly LightEdge Solutions) started out in 1996 as an Internet service provider selling networking solutions from its headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. As Lightedge chief revenue officer Sean Stenger explained to IT Jungle in a 2023 interview, the company slowly started adding additional services served out of co-location facilities …
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Shaking The IBM i Magic Eight Ball For 2026

January 26, 2026 Alex Woodie

After one more trip around the Sun, the IBM i community is back at it for another turn. What will become of our favorite box in 2026, let alone the people who work on it? That is not easy to say. As the great ballplayer/philosopher Yogi Berra once said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But we try anyway.

We kick off 2026 IBM i predictions with some targeted insight from Bill Langston, director of marketing, New Generation Software:

“I feel like 2026 will be a quiet year with the most adventurous IBM i customers …
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NAViGATE, inPower 2025 On Tap for September 2025

September 15, 2025 Alex Woodie

As the summer turns to fall, IBM i professionals will be turning out to a pair of events being hosted in the Midwest, including Infor’s imPower 2025 conference in Wisconsin, and COMMON’s NAViGATE conference taking place in Pennsylvania. Both shows are expected to draw hundreds of participants.

NAViGATE 2025 takes place this week in Pittsburgh. COMMON is hosting about 110 sessions on IBM i topics across the three-day event, including sessions on application development, security, high availability, and administering the system.

Tim Rowe, an IBM architect for application development, and Julia Yan, the lead developer of Navigator for i, will …
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2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Three

January 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

What will happen this year in the little neck of the IT wood that we call the IBM i community? It’s hard to say for sure, but one thing is certain: It sure a lot of fun guessing what might happen or what could happen! And who knows? Some of these predictions may actually come true.

After 20 years with IBM i software vendor PKS Software, Heidi Schmidt has seen a thing or two in the midrange. There have been many ups and downs over the years, and a wide array of names. But Schmidt is bullish that the …
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2025 IBM i Predictions, Part One

January 13, 2025 Alex Woodie

The new year is shaping up to be a big one for IBM i. A new release of the operating system is expected, as is a new processor and new servers built with them. Old utilities are slated to get the axe, but no one is quite sure how far IBM will cut. And then of course there’s what will happen in the IBM i community, which is where we turn for insight into what comes next.

We start this year’s batch of IBM i predictions with Charlie Guarino, the president of Central Park Data Systems and the resident expert …
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LightEdge Acquires Connectria To Round Out Each Other’s Power Play

April 22, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If there is a large group of IT customers who pay a premium for a premium product but who are also going to be experiencing a skills shortage in the coming years, then you want to be in the position of selling them networking, compute, and storage capacity in the cloud or in co-location facilities. And you also want to be able to sell them add-on managed services to get a bigger share of their overall budget while also helping them to get more things done.

That, in a nutshell, is why LightEdge Solutions is acquiring Connectria Hosting. Both companies …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: LightEdge Solutions

December 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The nature of the IBM i market is changing as the nature of the IBM i installed base is changing. With skills in short supply – and getting shorter by the day – and the work piling higher and higher as companies try to tackle application modernization and integration, different ways of acquiring and consuming compute and storage, and modern data analytics and artificial intelligence, we are entering an age where managed service and cloud suppliers will usurp the position formerly held by the business partners who worked downstream from IBM peddling and supporting on-premises Power Systems machinery.

Because variety …
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