I’ve spent most of my career in the IBM i community, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for it. 

I learned this business from some incredibly talented people. One of them was my dad, Scott Palma who owned a consulting and IBM Business Partner firm for over 30 years.  I’ve come to realize that watching my dad build a business was one of the biggest blessings of my life.  The other one being Pete Massiello who taught me that growing, educating, giving, and helping people inside and outside the company was the fastest way to build a brand and scale a business.   

I worked alongside engineers who took real pride in knowing a customer’s environment inside and out, and with salespeople who understood that earning a customer’s trust was far more important than closing the next deal. 

For a long time, that’s what being an IBM Business Partner meant to me. You knew your customers. You knew their systems. You knew what kept them up at night. When they had a problem, they knew who to call. And when you recommended something, they trusted that you were recommending it because it was the right thing for their business.  Heck, they even remembered to reach out in advance of your maintenance expiring.   

I still believe that’s what a great IBM Business Partner should be. 

But the IBM partner landscape has changed quite a bit. Over the years, we’ve watched many independent and regional IBM Business Partners get acquired and rolled into much larger organizations. Private equity has also become increasingly involved across the IBM partner ecosystem. Companies have gotten bigger, portfolios have become much broader, and the pressure to grow has increased. 

Growth isn’t a bad thing, and neither is private equity. There are plenty of large organizations doing good work. 

But scale changes things. When organizations get bigger, it becomes harder to maintain the personal relationships that made many of these companies special in the first place. Customers can find themselves working with different salespeople, different engineers, different departments, and different support teams. The contact saved in their phone for many years is now replaced with an automated ticketing system, and the person who really knew their environment may no longer be the person answering the phone. Over time, something that once felt like a partnership can start to feel more like a transaction. 

Turns out Heather Dinho and I were both chasing the same dream.  

We both believed there was still a place in this industry for a company that operated a little differently. A company that could take the best parts of the traditional IBM Business Partner model, deep expertise, personal relationships, responsiveness, accountability, and genuine care for the customer, and build around those things from day one. 

That’s why we created Relion Solutions. 

And I’m incredibly proud of what we’re building. We’re not trying to be the biggest IBM Business Partner. We’re not trying to sell every technology or be everything to everyone. We’re building a company around the technology and community we know. IBM Infrastructure and professional services for IBM i workloads.   

Helping customers maintain and enhance their IBM i infrastructure stack, so they can focus their efforts on what drives value for their businesses.   

This isn’t a side business for us. It’s what we do. 

We’re building Relion around the values our customers and the community are asking for and the way we want customers to be treated. We want to know our customers personally. We want to understand their environments and their businesses. We want them to have access to experienced people who can actually help them. We want to give honest advice, even when the answer doesn’t result in us selling something. 

And when we make a commitment, we want our customers to know we’re going to stand behind it. 

There is something very satisfying about building a company where you get to decide what matters. For us, that means doing quality work, answering the phone, being accountable, treating customers fairly, hiring people we’re proud to have represent our company, taking care of those people and their families, and building relationships we hope will last for decades. 

Those aren’t revolutionary ideas. In fact, they’re pretty old-fashioned, and that’s kind of the point. 

The IBM i community was built by people who cared deeply about their customers, their craft, and their reputation. There are still a lot of great people and great companies in this community operating that way today. We want Relion to be one of them. 

We’re still early in our story, and we know we have to earn that reputation one customer and one project at a time. But I couldn’t be more proud of the company we’re building or more excited about the opportunity in front of us. 

We created Relion because we believe customers still want a Business Partner who knows their name, knows their environment, answers when they call, and genuinely cares about their success. 

That’s the kind of IBM Business Partner I grew up around. And that’s the kind of IBM Business Partner we intend to be.