June 8, 2026
Lightedge, one of the largest private cloud providers serving the IBM i market, recently announced that it is going to begin offering IBM’s public cloud service, Power Virtual Server, to its customer base. The move comes amid solid growth in PowerVS and tough competition in the private cloud business.
Lightedge (formerly LightEdge Solutions) started out in 1996 as an Internet service provider selling networking solutions from its headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. As Lightedge chief revenue officer Sean Stenger explained to IT Jungle in a 2023 interview, the company slowly started adding additional services served out of co-location facilities in Kansas City, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska, before finally entering the IBM i private cloud business around 2015.
The company grew its cloud business, including VMware hosting and IBM Power servers, both organically and inorganically. It made its way into the regional cloud hosting markets with acquisitions in Austin, Texas, Raleigh, North Carolina, San Diego, California, and Phoenix, Arizona. Lightedge sold its “true cloud” IBM i offering to customers who needed anything from a DR/HA box to someone to run and manage their production applications.
Then in 2024, Lightedge bought Connectria, another midwestern IT firm born in 1996. Connectria had already established itself as one of the leaders in the burgeoning market for managed IBM i cloud services, as well as a Premier AWS partner. So when Lightedge absorbed the 1,000 IBM i LPARs that the St. Louis, Missouri-based Connectria said it managed, Lightedge became one of the largest private cloud providers in the IBM i community, if not the largest. (Lightedge says it is the largest by LPAR count, and it is most likely true, but it is very hard to independently verify these sorts of things.)
Before the acquisition, Lightedge had about 100 IBM i customers, which represented about 10 percent of its private cloud business, Stenger told TPM in 2023. Following the Connectria acquisition, Lightedge said it had 2,000 customers total, which includes both IBM i and non-IBM i customers.
Lightedge continued to build out its cloud. In late 2025, it hired Rob Goodwin, who previously was an executive AWS and SunGard Availability Service (now 11:11 Systems), to be its VP of solutions architecture, and then in April, it announced the acquisition of a 3 megawatt data center in Kansas City.
Meanwhile, IBM has also been growing its cloud business, both organically and through partnerships with VARs and private cloud providers that find it difficult to compete with Big Blue. When we wrote about PowerVS in April 2025, we estimated IBM had more than 700 PowerVS customers around the world (the last hard figure we heard was 650 in late 2024). One year ago, IBM’s Steve Sibley told the POWERUp 2025 crowd that the PowerVS business was growing at 30 percent annually. If that pace stayed the same, the company would have more than 900 PowerVS customers at this point.
The PowerVS footprint is certainly getting bigger. In 2025, IBM boasted that PowerVS was running in 22 datacenters in 12 regions and nine countries around the world. Today, according to the IBM PowerVS website, IBM is running PowerVS in 25 datacenters in the same 12 regions. It has expanded the PowerVS footprint in the Sao Paolo, Brazil region from two datacenters to three, and in Chennai, India, PowerVS has expanded from one datacenter to three.
Lightedge says the decision to add PowerVS to its slate of offerings will bolster its customers’ ability to run IBM i and AIX workloads. Customers can choose to run on-prem, on its IBM Power Cloud managed service offering, or on the IBM Cloud with PowerVS, all managed by Lightedge.
“Our clients no longer have to choose between the control of a private IBM Power environment and the flexibility of IBM Cloud,” stated Dale Levesque, senior vice president of product for Lightedge. “They can have both, managed by a single partner who knows IBM Power inside and out. That’s a level of optionality no one else in the market can match.”
Lightedge says its customers will benefit getting “end-to-end managed services” that span from creating a cloud strategy and migrating workloads to operating the cloud environment and assisting with disaster recovery.
Hannah Duce, Lightedge’s vice president of alliances and channel, says the company’s alliance with IBM is important to the company and its customers. “IBM Power Virtual Server opens up a new dimension of flexibility for IBM i and AIX workloads, and we’ve worked hard to make that capability fully accessible through Lightedge’s managed services model,” she stated.
Many of Lightedge’s competitors in the IBM i private cloud business have also partnered with IBM to sell PowerVS to their customer bases, including Fresche Solutions (which acquired Abacus Solutions in 2021), Meridian IT, and CloudFirst (formerly Data Storage Corp and SafeData).
In a 2025 interview, a Fresche executive told IT Jungle that significant improvements in the PowerVS offering made it more difficult to compete with Big Blue. While Fresche is still offering its own private cloud business, the company decided it was best to partner with IBM and attempt to “move up the value chain” by providing services closer to applications.
However, not all managed service providers have partnered with IBM to sell PowerVS. CloudSAFE, ProgrammersIO, Source Data Products, and Racksquared all appear to be providing their own private cloud for IBM i still, according to their websites. But with Lightedge now selling PowerVS, the number of IBM i private cloud providers who are going it alone is dwindling.
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