What does Fresche’s new acquisition bring to the IBM i community?
Our partners Fresche Solutions has acquired IBM i cloud, managed services and infrastructure solutions provider Abacus.
This now makes Fresche the world’s largest end-to-end provider of IBM i solutions.
Adding a cloud portfolio to an already attractive (and very impressive) stack of solutions for the IBM i marketplace further cements Fresche as IBM i market-leaders in the field.
For us at Proximity, we strive to provide the very best in technologies, IBM i application development tools and services for our growing IBM i user base.
With solutions such as cloud-based hosting & infrastructure, high availability, disaster recovery and backup, this partnership with Abacus offers alternatives to conventional on-premise options.
With Fresche and Abacus, we can help customers leverage the value in their legacy IBM i systems and the RPG, COBOL, and CA 2E (Synon) applications running on them, as the foundation for digital transformation and IT innovation.
Why Cloud for your IBM i ecosystem?
“The whole cloud offering seems to be growing and having a momentum of its own” commented Andy Nicholson, General Sales Manager for IBM i at Proximity.
“Cloud-based solutions have grown exponentially in the past decade, and picked up momentum just in the past couple of years, as home-working has become the norm.
“With more and more people working remotely, the physical location where a particular server is, is becoming less and less critical. As a result, companies are looking to offload their hardware proposition to trusted partners that can provide a reliable service”.
That comes with caveats: there has to be a good service contract within there that provides a guaranteed level of uptime to the customer. It also needs to have the option to be able to roll back to a particular release, or switch over to a different server should the worst happen.
With Cloud offerings, these options become ever more feasible.
Andy picks up on the options:
“For example, if your on-premise server went down, then to swap over to a server located in another building (owned by yourself) could cause some real issues, and it would be slow to proceed.
“But if you’ve subscribed to a cloud-based service that provides automatic swap-over to another cloud server, you’ll see little-to-no downtime in the service provided.
“Even for those businesses who wish to remain on their on-premise black box in the corner, instead of having nightly or weekly backups to tape, cloud gives you the option to have an automatic backup. The ability to swap back and forth as and when required is a real boon.
“In addition to being a backup for disaster recovery, you can flick over from your on-premise to cloud-based solution, should the worst happen and hardware failure occur”.
The Future is Cloud. The Future for IBM i is Cloud
A few years ago, the cloud was relatively new, and there was always a question mark over security and feasibility. But the events of the last few years have really brought the cloud to the forefront. If you’re running applications then that business continuity becomes even more critical.
We’re seeing more and more businesses moving from on-premise to cloud-based, and it’s only going to become more and more prevalent as the years go by.
“The cloud provides new options to the IBM i enterprise to be able to plan business continuity.”
To learn more about how Fresche Solutions, Abacus and cloud-based IBM i hosting could help your business, speak to Andy Nicholson by contacting us, emailing andy.nicolson@proximity.co.uk, or scheduling some time in his calendar.
Posted by Paul on 18th October 2021.