And more recently, UCG Technologies further expanded out into security assessments to help people find and fix the vulnerabilities in their IBM i systems as well as those systems that hook into them. The Canadian expansion was driven as much by data sovereignty issues as it was by application latency. UCG Technologies expanded out from its foundational system reselling and remote management business to the VAULT400 cloud backup business as well as selling HA as a service (through a number of partnerships with IBM i HA software suppliers), doing its own application hosting in datacenters located in redundant datacenters in the United States (dispersed in the Cleveland metro area) and in Canada (in Toronto and Calgary). That’s how Venzin ended up in Florida.īoth Kandrac and Venzin have been building up their portfolios of managed services in recent years.
Ron Venzin, chief executive officer at Focal Point, has an equally long history in the IBM midrange, and in recent years had a seven year stint as a senior vice president at strategic consultant Paradigm Technology from 2002 through 2009, was director of sales at HA software provider Vision Solutions (now in the Precisely conglomerate) from 2007 through 2010, and director of managed services and cloud solutions at Premise, based in Clearwater, Florida, from 2010 through 2014. Kandrac, who started his IBM midrange career at Big Blue after getting out of college in the Cleveland beat and did a few years pushing tin and iron at Leasing Dynamics before establishing United Computer Group, is very familiar to readers of The Four Hundred. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and being two privately held companies, we didn’t expect them to be. That, in a nutshell, is why Focal Point Solutions Group, which was founded back in 2014 with a high availability cluster testing service and IBM i hosting services and which is located in St Augustine, Florida, has acquired UCG Technologies, a long-time IBM i partner located in Cleveland, Ohio, with a diverse set of services that was founded back in 1987 by Jim Kandrac, just before the launch of the AS/400 after which this newsletter is named. The acquisitions are also being fueled by a business model of cross-selling across merged company portfolios and getting the size necessary to expand into new geographies and to find new customers as IBM i shops confront the growing complexity of their infrastructure and looming shortages in skilled IBM i personnel. There is a wave of acquisitions underway in the managed service provider (MSP) and technical support services businesses of the IBM i market, with companies trying to amass the skillsets to provide a more complete stack of services to IBM midrange shops. Focal Point Buys UCG Technologies, On The Hunt For More IBM i Deals
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