Abacus Solutions, an IT solutions and services provider, has recently received extensive attention and press around its “i in the Cloud” offering. Abacus has been providing hosting and support services for about three years, and “i in the Cloud” is a branch of those offerings launched in response to widespread demand for an AS/400 cloud environment.

Abacus has its roots in the secondary market, having established itself as an iSeries and pSeries reseller in 2000. Over time, Abacus has added engineers and support technicians to expand its offerings into the IT solutions and services space, as well as gained expertise in many of today's leading IT products and solutions.

The i-in-the-Cloud offering is cutting edge in that the customer does not have to purchase an entire Power Systems machine. Abacus leverages its in-house hosting services to sell “slices” of its POWER6 machines at reduced prices. These dedicated slices can be utilized either for development or to run production applications—or both. This approach results in a hefty price break for customers who do not want to invest in an entirely new server.

“When we brainstormed about this, we originally thought it would be for development environments,” said Patrick Schutz, Abacus’ director of Managed Services and Support. “But we have been pleasantly surprised by the number of customers who want to move production IBM i environments to the cloud.”

When a customer chooses Abacus to host their AS/400 environments, it means that the Abacus technicians are working around the clock to ensure that the environment is running and is secure.

“Our average response time for tech support is less than 10 minutes,” Schutz continued. “We are people, not some faceless cloud giant. We are big enough to matter but small enough to care.”

Recently, Abacus expanded its used iSeries cloud even further by joining with Infor to create the “System i Cloud” offering. Infor is the third largest provider of enterprise applications and services. This plan gives customers access to both Infor technical resources, as well as support from the Abacus “i in the Cloud” offering. More information about the solution and partnership, which were announced this spring at the COMMON 2012 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Anaheim, California. To learn more about the Abacus cloud offering, read the following article published by MC Press Online, New Tools, Insights, and Solutions Mark COMMON 2012 Vendor Announcements.