An Italian solution provider has doubled its ERP sales by betting on IBM i and Linux.

Sanmarco Informatica, based near Vicenza, has consolidated on model S814 Power hardware. The company is also doing a brisk trade in what it calls “cloud-on-site” systems, whereby it installs S814 servers at customers’ premises and manages them remotely.

Sanmarco’s solutions include the JGallileo ERP suite, its 4Words content management solution and the self-explanatory Next BI. These ran on a variety of platforms and the company was using a good deal of (pre-Lenovo era) xSeries hardware.

The firm teamed up with IBM tech specialists to optimise its software, much of which was Java-based, for Power8. Benchmark and stress tests demonstrated a significant performance improvement over Sanmarco’s Intel-based servers.

Sanmarko now runs its ERP apps on IBM i and remaining server resources run Linux. As well as deciding to standardise on Power hardware itself, it saw the IBM i/Linux combo as the best way to deliver its cloud-on-site deals.

Sanmarco Informatica’s president, Renato Bardin, says: “Cloud-on-site is the ideal solution for customers that want the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of our cloud model, but have stringent requirements about where their data is stored.”

This, he says, has been a particular success, meeting a gap in the market for users that want to avoid management and maintenance costs for physical infrastructure at the same time as addressing their security requirements.

Bardin says: “Our cloud-on-site model has already doubled our ERP sales in less than a year and we expect that this figure will continue to climb.”

According to a report just published by IBM, Sanmarco’s customers have reported significant reductions in time-to-deployment for new ERP apps. The S814 also enables big power, cooling and management savings, with customers reporting an average reduction in their operational spend of 50%.

The company has also tested Linux-based software to enable remote desktop capabilities, which it hopes will help its clients gain further savings in the future. This work has led to it becoming the first Italian member of IBM’s OpenPower Foundation.