managed service provider Archives

ERP Deployments Shift Cloudward, Even On IBM i

July 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

Applications of all sorts are moving to the cloud, including the critical ERP systems that businesses rely on to automate processes. That’s been the trend for some time in the industry as a whole, but it’s also having an impact on the IBM i community, which is becoming cloudier by the month.

While on-prem deployments of IBM i still dominate, the cloud portion is growing. Nearly one-quarter of IBM i shops have IBM i resources running in the cloud, according to HelpSystems’ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Study, including 6 percent who are cloud-only and 17 percent who run …
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IBM i Clouds Proliferating At Rapid Clip

October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

Summer has come to a close, but what a season it was for cloud computing and IBM i. We had two major public cloud vendors, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, delivering IBM i on Power Systems (although Azure’s IBM i service is delivered via Skytap), adding to IBM’s service, which was unveiled earlier in the year. But how much better will it get?

IBM i customers who were frustrated at the lack of public IBM i cloud options a year ago now have three to choose from. In early September, Skytap and Microsoft Azure publicly announced their joint offering to …
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It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …
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Public Cloud Dreaming For IBM i

January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

Is the IBM i community suffering from a bad case of cloud envy? While we profess to love our servers, it’s difficult to sit by and watch as our Windows and Linux colleagues tap into unlimited storage and compute resources offered by public cloud vendors. Maybe that will all change in 2019, but it’s not looking likely.

Public cloud vendors have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive data centers around to world to house scads of cheap X86 servers and storage resources. Tens of thousands of companies have moved some or all of their computing stacks into …
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SEA Adapts Messaging App For MSPs

January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

When it comes to managing workloads and applications, managed service providers (MSP) have a unique set of requirements. Due to these requirements, MSPs that run IBM i workloads often end up building their own systems management and monitoring software. With a new release of its message management software, Software Engineering of America (SEA) now has an out-of-the-box solution for MSPs.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady uptick of interest in private cloud environments hosted by MSPs. In the IBM i space, there are now dozens of MSPs operating in the market, including many former IBM business partners …
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Cloud Provides A Third HA Option

September 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

In the third part of our series on IBM i high availability options, we’re looking up — to the cloud, that is.

If you’re in the market to implement an IBM i high availability solution – and the best data we’ve seen indicates that many IBM i shops are shopping in 2017 – then you basically have three options to choose from: logical replication software solutions, IBM’s Power HA hardware solution, and a cloud-based HA solution.

We covered the first two offerings in previous stories (you can find our story on logical replication here and our story on PowerHA here …
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IBM i Shops Seeking More Services

March 27, 2017 Dan Burger

Many folks view managed services as a replacement for processes that company employees used to do. Like backing up data, for instance. Slow backups and nearly closed windows for planned downtime have more organizations looking at the managed service providers for improved efficiencies and the opportunity to add a disaster recovery plan that makes sense.

That used to be a big part of managed services, but the definition has greatly expanded in the past few years. As IT complexity has soared, there are many pieces in the IT puzzle that are missing or a bad fit in organizations that struggle …
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Bank-Turned MSP Sees Growth in IBM i

March 1, 2017 Alex Woodie

There aren’t a lot of areas of the IBM i business that are growing these days. Fewer companies are running the platform, which causes young people to look elsewhere to start their careers. That dynamic is actually helping to drive business for First National Technology Solutions, which was an IBM i customer before becoming a managed service provider (MSP).

In January, First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) announced it was seeing “a sharp increase” in demand for IBM i and mainframe hosting. While the Omaha, Nebraska-based company gets most of its revenue by providing private and hybrid cloud hosting for Windows …
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