Canada’s Fresche Legacy has bought Australian IBM i apps modernisation specialist looksoftware.

The purchase, for an undisclosed sum, comes twelve months after Fresche Legacy took over British application and database analysis outfit Databorough, best known for its X-Analysis solution.

Under the terms of the agreement, looksoftware has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Fresche Solutions Pty. The company and its products will continue to be marketed and sold under the looksoftware name.

Looksoftware, headquartered in Melbourne, provides Power i web, cloud and mobile solutions including its flagship tool, newlook. With around 3,000 customers around the world, it majors in UI design (see, for instance, this article on the subject on PowerWire.eu by the company’s Nick Hampson).

Andy Kulakowski, president and CEO of Montreal-based Fresche Legacy, described the deal as creating “a company greater than the sum of its parts”.

Kulakowski said: “The market is facing a number of modernisation challenges including staff attrition and a skill shortage for RPG, COBOL, CA 2E (Synon) and CL – the primary programming languages on the IBM i. CIOs want to retain the value that this tried and true platform brings to their enterprise, but know they need to modernise databases, applications and front-ends to provide continued maintenance while supporting business users.”

Brendan Kay, CEO of looksoftware described the deal as positive for the IBM i market.

He said: “The platform has more enterprise clients than any other operating system from IBM. There are hundreds of thousands of installations in more than one hundred thousand organisations. We have always been focused as a business on assisting these organisations by providing easy-to-use tools that enable them to reuse, extend, integrate and web-enable existing IT investments. In Fresche Legacy, we have found a company that shares our commitment to the customer and that clearly sees a continued strategic role and place for this powerful platform as a critical business enabler.”