Dancerace

Overview

Australia’s largest non-bank business lender selected Dancerace to provide the core operating system for their working capital products. There was just one catch: for compliance reasons, all data would need to stay within Australia. Meridian IT helped Dancerace find a solution by launching a new platform in the IBM Cloud, hosted in IBM’s Sydney data centre.

Business Challenge

Since 1992, Dancerace has provided clients  worldwide with state-of-the-art solutions for  asset-based lending, receivables, and factoring.  As a perpetual innovator, Dancerace was quick to  adopt cloud computing and was one of the first  companies in its sector to offer a software-as-a service model.  

To make this new model work, Dancerace knew  it needed a rock-solid cloud platform and a  partner that could manage it reliably 24/7/365.  This would free the company to concentrate on  product development, rather than worrying about  infrastructure. 

That’s why Dancerace came to Meridian IT, as CEO  Elliot Avison recalls: “When we met Meridian, they  very quickly understood that we need to build  resilience into everything we do and shared  our values for support and quality of service.  With Meridian we could demonstrate to our  customers that we have a safe pair of hands  looking after the services and platforms that  they rely on.” 

Meridian IT helped Dancerace rationalise its IBM  i landscape and consolidate to a much smaller  number of logical partitions (LPARs), which it  migrated to a high-availability environment in the  Meridian Power Cloud. The Meridian team then  took responsibility for managing the infrastructure,  as well as providing backup and comms services  for Dancerace in the UK. 

“Since moving to the Meridian Power Cloud,  we’ve been able to focus completely on our  products,” says Elliot Avison. “While maintaining  the highest levels of availability and security,  we’ve launched products faster than ever—and  we’re winning business on the back of that.” 

In particular, Dancerace has been expanding  in the Asia-Pacific region, and when a large  Australian company made contact, it was eager to help. However, to meet specific compliance  requirements, this new client stipulated that all its  data had to be hosted within Australia. 

“At that time, we didn’t have a hosting partner in  Australia,” says Elliot Avison. “So, we turned to  our partners Meridian IT and asked them to find  a solution.” 

Solution

Together, the Dancerace and Meridian IT teams  evaluated options for an in-country environment  that could meet the new client’s compliance  requirements. At that time, most states were in  lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and  data centres had tight restrictions on physical  access—so setting up a private cloud environment  like the Meridian Power Cloud wasn’t viable. 

Instead, Meridian proposed migrating to a public  cloud platform that could host Dancerace’s core  IBM i applications at a regional data centre in  Australia. The best choice was IBM Cloud, due to  its superior support for IBM i environments and  multicloud integration capabilities, which would  make it easier to interact with other Dancerace  applications running on Amazon Web Services. 

Using industry-standard tools to ensure that the  new environment would be portable to any cloud,  the Meridian IT team built a platform that closely  mirrored the configuration of the Dancerace  systems running in the UK. The only exception  was the high availability setup, which needed to be  configured specifically for the IBM Cloud. 

Customer Benefits

With the new IBM Cloud environment, Dancerace  can give its new client the guarantees they need  that their data will be stored and managed in country, enabling the company to onboard a major  new account. 

Moreover, the IBM Cloud solution opens up  opportunities for Dancerace to market to other  Australian businesses, at a time when data  sovereignty is becoming an increasingly urgent  and regulated concern for lenders. 

Crucially, Meridian IT has designed the new  platform to be scalable and flexible, so Dancerace  can expand it on demand as its Australian  business continues to grow. Since all the  components of the solution are based on industry  standards, it will be easy to migrate to another  public or private cloud platform if necessary.