For many years, Skytap has been Microsoft's preferred partner to provide customers with a rehost option of their IBM Power Systems (AIX and iSeries). Skytap has been the go-to Midrange-as-a-Service provider for many Microsoft Azure customers. Yet, as the world becomes more demanding and cloud native products more enticing, customers want IaaS solutions to integrate seamlessly with a growing array of SaaS offerings. Who can say no to that? Plus, the goal for these boutique independent partners is that they grow not to be a boutique independent partner. Consider the recent industry shifts: Model9 being acquired by BMC, Microfocus by Rocket Software, and Astadia by Amdocs.
Kyndryl, on the other hand, is the global System Integrator, Managed Services Partner, who has all the cloud and legacy ingredients to make a flavorful and innovative recipe. The union of Skytap with Kyndryl promises to drive the development of Skytap’s offerings. We can anticipate rapid growth and innovation in their Midrange-as-a-Service offering, including enhanced security features, integration with advanced monitoring and development cloud tools, and increased vCPU capacity. Now, that is from a solution’s perspective.
We cannot ignore the biggest advantage of this partnership, which is that Skytap will now be able to offer Managed services to its customers. Today, Skytap has a very strong Professional services team that excels in migrating on-premises Power environments to Skytap on Azure. With Kyndryl's extensive team of experienced SMEs, powerful services delivery muscle, and “trusted advisor” status with its customers, Skytap will be able to scale up their migration efforts and add the ability to manage applications running on Power systems. Sounds like a full 4 course meal doesn't it?
A critical part of migrating to Skytap on Azure is creating the landing zone and ensuring connectivity between the on-premises sites and Skytap. This is another area where Kyndryl can immensely contribute to accelerating migrations to Skytap on Azure. Kyndryl has had a history of designing landing zones and understanding their customer’s connectivity needs inside and out.
Globally, Skytap is available in 9 Azure regions, and in the US, Skytap on Azure customers can choose from deploying their environment in US East and South Central. That won’t change. Microsoft’s, plus now Kyndryl’s customers, will be able to take advantage of the low latency benefit of having these power systems within the Azure data centers. In the future, we can only hope to expand to more and more regions. We welcome this new partnership and Kyndryl’s customers to Skytap on Azure!
If you would like to learn more about this topic, or discuss your ideas, please contact the Microsoft team at mainframetransformed@microsoft.com.