Fresche Makes Moves In The Cloud

March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

Fresche Solutions is well known for IBM i application modernization, a line of business in which it has been successful for many decades. Thanks to its acquisition of OmniData Insights and a new partnership with IBM, the company is launching new ventures in the cloud.

In early March, Fresche Solutions announced a partnership with IBM that will see Fresche managing IBM Power Virtual Server (PowerVS) customers. PowerVS is IBM’s cloud offering, and gives customers the capability to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux operating systems either in IBM datacenters or its partners’ datacenters. The deal with IBM means that Fresche is now one of the partners offering PowerVS.

Fresche is no cloud newbie. In October 2021, you will remember, the company acquired Abacus Solutions, one of the largest managed service providers (MSPs) serving the IBM i private cloud market. For the past three years, Fresche has been running the Abacus MSP business, which was used by hundreds of IBM i customers when Fresche bought it.

Now that Fresche is a PowerVS partner, it seems likely that those existing Abacus customers will be encouraged to migrate to PowerVS (although the details of how that would work aren’t clear). Moving to PowerVS would bring a number of benefits, including standardized provisioning, unified management interfaces, and integrated backup, disaster recovering, and high availability. Fresche obviously will target new cloud customers with PowerVS as well, helping them to leave the world of on-prem computing behind and embrace the cloud for production workloads.

“This partnership with IBM aligns with Fresche’s mission to simplify and modernize IT environments for our customers,” stated Lief Morin, Fresche’s general manager of cloud. “IBM PowerVS is designed for mission-critical workloads for the most demanding industries. Fresche’s PowerVS managed services ensure a seamless onboarding and operational experience. In addition, our experts can help manage client applications 24/7/365 – a unique offering to help keep the lights on. Together, we’re empowering businesses to transform and harness the full potential of the cloud.”

In a separate deal, Fresche is also making inroads into another cloud. Its January acquisition of OmniData Insights gives Fresche a foot in Microsoft Azure, the giant Microsoft cloud that trails only massive Amazon Web Services in size and reach.

As a consulting company, OmniData Insights specialized in helping customers build data analytics and AI solutions running on Microsoft Fabric, the company’s cloud-based data fabric solution. The company developed OmniAnalytics, a Microsoft Fabric-based platform designed to help customers with data management and reporting tasks.

“The acquisition of OmniData represents a pivotal step in the expansion of Fresche’s core business beyond IBM i,” stated Fraser Preston, managing partner at American Pacific Group, the private equity firm that owns Fresche. “OmniData’s expertise in AI-enabled data and analytics, paired with Fresche’s leadership in IBM i transformation, creates a powerful synergy to address the evolving needs of customers on both IBM i and Microsoft x86 platforms.”

According to Fresche chief executive officer, Joe Zarrehparvar, the deal with OmniData “marks a pivotal moment in our mission to reimagine data modernization four our industry.”

“Our clients operate in complex, multi-platform environments that require secure and reliable solutions, whether on-premise, private cloud, or across hybrid infrastructures like Microsoft Azure,” Zarrehparvar stated. “Together with OmniData, we are uniquely positioned to deliver cutting-edge, AI-driven analytics and transformative data insights that empower organizations to untuck their full potential.”

The vast majority of Fresche customers are IBM i shops. While IBM i itself doesn’t run in Microsoft Azure, IBM i data can certainly be crunched in Azure. A wide array of analytics and AI services are available in the Azure cloud, both from Microsoft and its partners. Once pipelines are built to pump data into the cloud, IBM i customers can tap into Microsoft’s flagship Synapse Analytics offering for powerful SQL processing, for example or tap into AI capabilities offered by Azure partners like DataBricks or OpenAI.

“We are excited about the opportunities this partnership with Fresche Solutions brings,” OmniData chief executive officer CEO Tobias Eld stated. “OmniData and Fresche share key values – a commitment to customer success, solutioning expertise, and technical depth. By combining OmniData’s data analytics and AI expertise with Fresche’s leadership in IBM i modernization and legacy transformation, we will deliver end-to-end digital transformation solutions to help businesses modernize, optimize, and unlock their systems’ full potential.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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