Pizza as a Service Pt. 2 – One Provider to Help You Make Your Pizza and Eat It Too

Abacus Offers Enhanced IBM i as a Service That Includes AS/400 Applications Solutions and Support Through Its Parent Company

At Abacus, we believe the future of IBM i platform is cloud. That’s why our goal is to run the last 10,000 IBM i environments with, and for, our customers. But for those that want to keep certain aspects of their infrastructure on-premise, Abacus is happy to help with our comprehensive managed services or even hybrid solutions.

Back in August, we published our own spin on the ever popular “Pizza as a Service” analogy, calling it IBM i as a Service. In that blog post, the IBM i as a Service infographic we created illustrated that Abacus did not provide services at the Application level of your IBM i environment, i.e. – how you ate your pizza. Instead, Abacus took on increasing amounts of responsibility over a customer’s IBM i hardware and infrastructure the further they moved to the cloud. That all changed when Fresche Solutions acquired Abacus back in September, prompting us to revisit our version of Pizza as a Service.

IBM i Application Services and Solutions

Abacus’ new ownership changes a significant aspect of our original IBM i as a Service infographic. Now, a variety of application-focused services are available to Abacus customers through Fresche Solutions. That means customers can stay on the IBM i platform and still enjoy the benefits of modern solutions both on-premise and in the cloud.
 

• IT Strategy & Planning
  • Discovery Services that deliver better business value by aligning IT initiatives with strategic business goals. Providing customers with validated roadmaps that allow for increased agility.
• GUI, Web & Mobile
  • Web enablement of green screen applications
  • Mobile and Web application development
• Code and Database transformation
  • Improve maintainability and future proof your IT by using mainstream technologies that augment and extend existing IBM i applications.
• Analysis & Productivity
  • X-Analysis Suite
    • Impact analysis
    • Database modeling
    • Graphical documentation
    • Metrics and Problem Analysis
• Development, Staffing and Application Services
  • Small, Medium, Large models of service available.
    • Application Support: minimal monthly capacity retainer for when you need it (16hrs, 40 hrs, 80 hrs per month)
    • Staff augmentation: extend your team, replace retiring staff, and reduce IT backlog with skilled, full-time resource(s)
    • Managed Application Services: Fresche assumes control of all or part of the execution component of IT
• Reporting & Document Distribution

This bulleted overview of the application services that Fresche Solutions brings to the table gives Abacus customers more ways to enjoy their pizza. Customers also benefit from no longer needing to mix and match service providers that will cover all aspects of their IBM i environments. Fresche + Abacus is now the only company in the industry that can provide end-to-end services for the entire lifecycle of your IBM i system.

Benefits For Both New and Existing Customers

So, what are some of the other benefits of these expanded offerings? For one, customers, both new and old, have even greater flexibility with how they “build and add to the pizza” of their IBM i. Those that want to stay on-premise can start their Abacus partnership with smaller services like disaster recovery or OS upgrade test flights, and then add green screen-to-web GUI development or database transformation. On the other hand, companies that want to start transitioning to the cloud have even more options to choose from. Does your company want an easy-to-enter, short term cloud to host its AS/400 environment? We can do that with our Entry i Cloud. Does it also want to transform its RPG codebase into something more modern like PHP or Java? We can do that too.

Additionally, customer’s benefit from a more holistic approach to improving and extending the life of their IBM i. Instead of trying to overcome individual obstacles like redundancy, data security, or even loss of staffing, customers can initiate IT engagements based on broader questions about their business goals. Can your IT infrastructure support your company’s business plan for the next 10 years? What kind of user experience do your applications provide? Is it modern and efficient? Will your technical debt outlive your remaining technical team?

The New Pizza Maker

For some companies, the possibility of moving their business operations off the IBM i platform is a non-starter. But now there are even fewer reasons to try and do it all by themselves. The combination of Fresche Solutions and Abacus Solutions means customers have a new, more capable “pizza maker” for their IBM i; a singular end-to-end, IBM i Cloud, Managed Services, and Application Modernization Solutions provider. Abacus supports their AS/400 from a hardware and infrastructure standpoint while Fresche offers software-based AS/400 solutions and support. Contact Abacus today to find out how we can start “making the pizza” for your company.