Sora Company, Limited was founded in Osaka, Japan in 1987. Since then, they have developed a services business for information systems development focused on small to midsize IBM i clients in the apparel, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and manufacturing industries. Sora Company originally ran both IBM Power and Windows-based servers in-house for their own business and software development purposes. With a limited workforce of only four people, the workload of operating and maintaining servers had become a burden. Additionally, without a separate server room or data center, the heat and noise generated by the servers became a distraction and a barrier to productivity for their staff.
Meanwhile, in September of 2014, a failure occurred that caused their mail server to go down. The adoption of Microsoft 365 on the cloud as an emergency response led to the migration of DNS servers to the cloud. Sora also migrated their SVN server that performs source code control required for development to the cloud. That left their IBM i and Power environment that was running their business. Sora considered IBM i cloud services from various companies, but ultimately decided to adopt IBM® Power® Virtual Server with its flexible pay-as-you-go capabilities.
The adoption of Power Virtual Server was also influenced by the changing landscape of software development on IBM i. In the past, it was common practice for a company like Sora to develop software and applications using RPG on their own server and then deliver them to the client environment. The number of organizations going directly into their company for development and maintenance has increased, but the frequency of those using their own IBM i environment for this software development has decreased. Additionally, open source technologies like PHP have increased in popularity alongside traditional languages such as RPG. When developing with PHP for example, most of the work is done by the developer on a local machine, and the connection to IBM i is made only when checking database access, so the load on IBM i is significantly reduced.
For Sora Company, however, the key deciding factor for adopting IBM i on Power Virtual Server was the flexible configuration options and capabilities. Before the implementation, Sora conducted a Proof of Concept (PoC) with the support of IBM. During the PoC, they were able to reduce their compute and memory required, significantly reducing their costs for software development. Networking proved to be no issue as well, since the connection used during software development was mainly for database access.
The flexibility of Power Virtual Server proved to be a huge advantage as well. Sora can use minimal resources during normal software development and scale up or down as needed when providing demos to their customers. With other cloud services, it might take several days after applying with documentation to increase compute and memory resources, proving the flexibility of Power Virtual Server to be the deciding factor. Sora was also able to get current and upgrade to the latest release of IBM i on Power Virtual Server, increasing performance and reducing security vulnerabilities for their applications. Power Virtual Server was the optimal choice for Sora Company, as it not only reduced their burden of managing in-house servers, but also enabled flexible system usage that is more tailored to their business and software development needs.