IBM Power Cloud and Hosting Provider Directory

Provider Profiles

Named IBM Power Providers

Each profile is built from the provider's own published material and independent trade press, with vendor claims labeled as such. These are not rankings, and the list is not exhaustive. Verify every field directly with the provider before relying on it.

Market Context

This Market Consolidated Hard Between 2024 and 2026

Almost every provider on this page changed hands, changed leadership, or changed platform strategy in the last two years, and in several cases the change is not mentioned on the provider's own IBM Power page. None of this is disqualifying. All of it belongs in your due diligence, because a three-year hosting contract will likely outlast at least one of these transitions.

• Lightedge acquired Connectria, April 2024

  Roughly 1,000 IBM i partitions moved with the deal, and it is the source of most of Lightedge's IBM i book. Two years on, connectria.com still runs as a separate brand, so a buyer comparing quotes from both is comparing two quotes from one company.

• Kyndryl acquired Skytap, May 2024

  Skytap on Azure became Kyndryl Cloud Uplift. Kyndryl then withdrew IBM Power from Cloud Uplift on IBM Cloud and from its US-West region in August 2025, and retired the IBM Cloud offering entirely in March 2026. Cloud Uplift for Power is Azure-only now.

• Park Place acquired CSI, parent of Tectrade, May 2025

  Tectrade is one of the two partners TierPoint names for IBM Power delivery. Its ownership moved without any change to TierPoint's published material.

• Performive acquired CloudFirst from Data Storage Corporation, September 2025

  CloudFirst is TierPoint's other named IBM Power partner, and is separately profiled here. The buyer is backed by Renovus Capital Partners. Around 40 million dollars gross, with the brand and leadership said to remain intact.

• Argo took majority control of TierPoint, December 2025

  Argo Infrastructure Partners bought out most minority shareholders. Argo itself was acquired by Apollo Global Management, announced January 2025. TierPoint announced a search for its next chief executive in March 2026.

• Berkshire Partners and Court Square invested in Thrive, January 2025

  M/C Partners fully exited. It is Thrive's third change of control in nine years, alongside a run rate of four to five acquisitions a year and a stated goal of one billion dollars in revenue by 2029.

• Lightedge began reselling IBM Power Virtual Server, May 2026

  Not an ownership change, but the most consequential competitive move of the period. It joined Fresche Solutions, Meridian IT, and CloudFirst as independents that now sell IBM's own platform alongside their private clouds.

How to Choose

Running an IBM Power Provider Selection

A sequence that produces a defensible decision rather than a pile of proposals. Steps two and three are where most shortlists get cut in half.

1. 1

   Write down the two numbers first

   How long can the business be down, and how much data can it afford to lose. Everything else follows from those. Providers will happily design around whatever you do not specify, and you will find out what they assumed during your first real outage.

2. 2

   Rule out on hard constraints, not on brochures

   Your IBM i release, your largest partition size, whether you need Linux on Power, and any compliance framework you have to inherit. Each of those eliminates providers outright. Doing this first turns a list of twelve into a list of three.

3. 3

   Find out who actually holds the skills

   Ask whether the company's own engineers run IBM i, or whether a partner does. Ask how many hold current certifications and where they sit. A large data center footprint and a deep IBM i bench are unrelated things, and several providers here have one without the other.

4. 4

   Get the platform named in writing

   The specific building for production, the specific building for DR, the POWER generation, and the IBM i release ceiling that generation implies. Most providers publish none of this. All of them will tell you if you ask, and the answer belongs in the contract.

5. 5

   Price the whole thing, including the parts sold separately

   Licensing, managed services, DR test days, out-of-hours support tiers, network, and exit. Several offerings here look inexpensive because the operating system support, the recovery testing, or the weekend coverage is a separate line item.

6. 6

   Ask what happens when they get sold

   Four of the five providers profiled here are private-equity owned or have changed control recently. Change-of-control provisions, price protection, and data portability terms are cheap to negotiate before you sign and impossible afterward.

Not Profiled Yet

Other Providers Serving This Market

This directory is incomplete by design rather than by omission: profiles are added as each provider's published material is checked properly. The following also serve IBM i and AIX buyers and should be on your radar even though they are not profiled here yet. Their absence is not a judgment about them.

Ensono, FNTS, Meridian IT, Fresche Solutions, Racksquared, CloudSAFE, Source Data Products, ProgrammersIO, Performive, and Park Place Technologies. Several of these resell IBM Power Virtual Server alongside their own platforms, which is worth asking about directly, and two of them now own the delivery capability behind providers that are profiled here.