Skytap makes its IBM Power offering on Azure publicly available

Seattle-based IT company Skytap recently announced the public availability of its service to run IBM Power applications in Azure. The offering is geared toward traditionally on-prem environments, running IBM i, AIX or Linux on Power workloads. A large number of companies use IBM i environments alongside Windows and Azure, prompting a need to better integrate and migrate systems.

Dan Jones, senior vice president of product at Skytap told MSDW:

[We have a] mandate to bring non-cloud friendly workloads to Azure. They procure IBM Power hardware, deploy it in Azure and deploy service on top of that. We're not doing any emulation, this is all running natively in Azure. Enterprises now have path to bring traditional workloads off of on-prem and connect up to Azure native services, [or link up with] Azure VMs and route traffic. This unlocks fascinating use cases like running rich analytics or modernizing apps with mobile front ends or starting to inject machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The service is intended for multi-tenant scenarios, with customers shifting workloads to Azure Dedicated in-combination with IBM hardware. Jones said: