Since 1992, Dancerace has provided clients worldwide with state-of-the-art solutions for asset-based lending, receivables and factoring. As a perpetual innovator, Dancerace was quick to adopt cloud computing and was one of the first companies in its sector to offer a software-as-a-service model. To make this new model work, Dancerace knew it needed a rock-solid cloud platform and a partner that could manage it reliably 24/7/365. This would free the company to concentrate on product development, rather than worrying about infrastructure.
Dancerace turned to IBM Business Partner Meridian IT. Meridian IT helped Dancerace rationalize their IBM i landscape and consolidate it to a much smaller number of logical partitions, which they migrated to a high availability environment in the Meridian Power Cloud. The Meridian team then took responsibility for managing the infrastructure, as well as providing backup and comms services for Dancerace in the United Kingdom.
The company has been expanding in the Asia Pacific region, and when a large Australian company made contact, they were eager to help. However, to meet specific compliance requirements, this new client stipulated that all their data had to be hosted within the borders of Australia. Together, the Dancerace and Meridian IT teams evaluated options for an in-country environment that could meet the new client’s compliance requirements. At that time, most states were in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and data centers had tight restrictions on physical access, so setting up a private cloud environment like the Meridian Power Cloud wasn’t viable.
Instead, Meridian proposed migrating to a public cloud platform that could host Dancerace’s core IBM i applications at a regional data center in Australia. The best choice was IBM® Power® Virtual Server collocated with the IBM Cloud®, due to its superior support for IBM i environments and multicloud integration capabilities, which would make it easier to interact with other Dancerace applications running on Amazon Web Services. Using industry-standard tools to ensure that the new environment would be portable to any cloud, the Meridian IT team built a platform that closely mirrored the configuration of the Dancerace systems running in the UK.
With the new IBM Power Virtual Server environment, Dancerace can give its new client the guarantee they need that their data will be stored and managed within Australia, enabling the company to onboard a major new account. Moreover, the IBM Cloud solution opens opportunities for Dancerace to market to other Australian businesses, at a time when data sovereignty is becoming an increasingly urgent and regulated concern for lenders. Crucially, Meridian IT has designed the new platform to be scalable and flexible, so Dancerace can scale it on demand as their Australian business continues to grow. Since all the components of the solution are based on industry standards, it will be easy to migrate to another public or private cloud platform if necessary.