Merger gives IBM i market a Fresche look

Fresche Legacy has announced its merger with looksoftware, a company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia specializing in web, cloud and mobile solutions for the IBM i, and particularly in GUI modernization. The merger combines Fresche Legacy's deep modernization product and service expertise with looksoftware's extensive product suite, including newlook, the most advanced design and development environment for IBM i GUI modernization.

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

As a result of the merger, IBM i users can now turn to one partner to address full life-cycle application management and all levels of modernization. Together, the two companies will offer: managed services, staff augmentation, IT planning, platform and application analysis, UI enhancements, mobile and cloud enablement and application and database modernization to align IT with evolving business goals. Companies will be able to understand their modernization options, develop a plan and implement their modernization strategy. Fresche and looksoftware give IBM i users a place to start their modernization and provide all of the skills, products and services necessary to complete the journey. The merger effectively removes the confusion surrounding modernization options for the platform and provides a partner focused on helping grow the value of IT and the IBM i.

"This is a merger that creates a company greater than the sum of its parts," says Andy Kulakowski, President and CEO of Fresche Legacy. "We are very excited to welcome the looksoftware staff, their amazing products and their thousands of satisfied customers. We are committed to the ongoing success of our customers and all users of the IBM i platform. The market is facing a number of modernization 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 modernize databases, applications and front ends to provide continued maintenance while supporting business users. By combining forces with looksoftware, we can directly address these challenges. Together, we will deliver an extensive array of tools for modernizing the user experience and applications and provide enterprise services to better manage, maintain, enhance and evolve IT environments. The looksoftware team has people, products and skills that are dedicated to making customers successful. Their philosophy of "Simplicity. Productivity. Satisfaction." resonates well with Fresche, making them a great business fit with our organization.

"We are very proud about becoming part of the Fresche family," says Brendan Kay, CEO of looksoftware. "With Fresche, we share a passion for continuing customer success on the IBM i platform. Combining our companies is a highly positive development for looksoftware's customers and for the entire IBM i market. 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 organizations. We have always been focused as a business on assisting these organizations 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. We are very excited about the potential this merger brings to broaden our reach and provide our customers with services to address all of their application management and modernization needs."