Today, countless enterprises rely on IBM Power systems to run mission-critical workloads and applications. Many have built highly customized business-critical applications on IBM i and AIX. In fact, the most recent annual survey from Help Systems found that 67% of organizations rely on home-grown applications on their IBM i servers.
While enterprises increasingly recognize the value of including IBM Power workloads and applications in their broader cloud modernization strategies, these legacy on-premise systems often represent a transformation bottleneck. Such migrations have historically been viewed as time-consuming and risky. Made publicly available in the Azure Marketplace in 2020, Skytap on Azure transformed the future of the IBM Power estate by creating a simple, low-risk path to Azure for IBM Power workloads and applications.
Skytap was purpose-built to run IBM Power in the cloud and provides a practical way for organizations to continue to realize value from existing investments in IBM Power-based applications with the ability to run traditional IBM Power, IBM i (AS/400), AIX, or x86 workloads natively in Azure. Importantly, it allows customers to do so without costly and timely refactoring, replatforming or rearchitecting.
Skytap has now developed a partnership with leading technology adviser and managed service provider Ensono to help enterprises quickly and confidently realize cloud-scale benefits for their IBM Power investments and make the transition to Skytap on Azure with ease. Ensono helps customers migrate IBM i environments to Skytap on Azure and manages these environments with its Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services. It also helps customers derive additional value post migration by leading customer efforts to use Azure-native applications and tooling to extend value and usage of customers’ IBM Power environments. And with flexibility built into its contracting, Ensono meets customers where they are now on their transformation journey while supporting their pivot toward new opportunities on the path ahead.
“Successful cloud transformation for IBM Power workloads relies on expertise, partnership and implementation support,” states Skytap Senior Vice President of Business Development Neil Holloway. “Ensono offers best-in-class consulting and implementation services to help customers confidently realize cloud-scale value for their IBM Power estate in Azure.”
For Ensono, Syktap on Azure accelerates its customers’ cloud transformation for IBM Power workloads. “Ensono with its rich experience of managing complex systems like IBM Power for customers globally combined with Skytap’s industry-leading Azure-based platform and associated expertise gives customers with legacy platforms, who want to make the move to Azure the best end-to-end experience in the market today,” states Ensono CTO of Public Cloud Gordon McKenna.
Once IBM Power workloads are migrated to Azure, enterprises can incrementally modernize and expand the value of existing applications. One of the biggest impacts of this can be seen in how Skytap on Azure can support enterprise data modernization. Today, as much as 80% of a company’s data resides in legacy systems. Migrated IBM Power workloads can be connected to Azure native analytics services to support advanced data analytics, data visualization and reporting, AI and machine learning and more.
More about Skytap Partner Ensono
Ensono is an expert technology adviser and managed services provider. It specializes in helping enterprises with the strategic migration of mainframe and IBM Power workloads and applications to the cloud to drive growth, improve the customer experience and power new products and services. As a relentless ally, Ensono partners closely with enterprise clients to transform their organization, innovate new and disruptive technologies and optimize their IT operations to achieve better business outcomes. Its dedicated team works across hybrid environments with services that span consulting, mainframe and application modernization. The Ensono Digital team leverages the latest cloud technologies for cloud native development and cloud migrations. A Microsoft Datacenter Transformation Partner of the year, with certified experts in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, Ensono has over 2,900 associates globally and is headquartered in greater Chicago. For more information, visit Ensono.com.
