Covenco Welcomes Mark Boyce: Reinforcing Specialist Support for IBM i and IBM Power Customers

11th May 2026

A targeted investment in IBM i expertise

Covenco is pleased to announce that Mark Boyce has joined the company as Technical Consultant, working alongside our existing IBM Power Systems team to support customers across the UK and Ireland. Mark joined Covenco last week.

Mark’s appointment is a deliberate one. The pool of engineers with genuine, long-tenure IBM i experience continues to shrink – and yet the platform remains business-critical for thousands of organisations across financial services, manufacturing, retail, logistics and the public sector. Covenco has supported these workloads since 1989, and we believe the right response to a tightening skills market is to keep investing in people who know the platform inside out.

More than 14 years on the IBM i platform

Mark joins us after a 14-year career with Precisely, where he built his reputation as a Senior Support Engineer covering enterprise customers in 24/7 support organisations.

His specialisms read like a checklist of the capabilities our IBM Power customers rely on most:

• IBM i / AS400 / iSeries operations: OS/400 upgrades and patching, save/restore, journaling and recovery, security, TCP/IP, LPAR/HMC management, and Client Access data transfers.
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery replication: in-depth experience with MIMIX, iTera and OMS/ODS (OMS400) – the replication technologies still underpinning many of the most demanding IBM i HA/DR estates in the UK and Ireland.
• Incident management and troubleshooting: structured, end-to-end ownership of incidents from evidence gathering and severity assessment through to root cause, resolution and post-incident follow-up.
• Knowledge transfer: onboarding new engineers, contributing to process improvement, and authoring the kind of knowledge base content that helps both customers and colleagues resolve issues faster.

In Mark’s own words, he is known for “structured troubleshooting, clear communication, and taking end-to-end ownership of incidents.” That sentiment maps closely to the way our customers describe the service they expect from Covenco.

What this means for Covenco customers

For senior IT managers and CIOs running IBM Power, three things tend to keep the conversation alive at board level:

1. Resilience against ransomware and operational disruption.
   Replication and immutable backup are only as effective as the team supporting them at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.
2. The modernisation roadmap.
   Whether that’s a Power10 refresh, a migration from older iSeries hardware, or a re-platforming of HA/DR onto a more sustainable footing.
3. Continuity of expertise.
   Long-serving IBM i staff are retiring; commercial partners who can credibly fill that gap are increasingly rare.

Mark’s appointment strengthens Covenco’s position on all three. He adds practical depth to our Managed Services, Disaster Recovery and Backup as a Service propositions, and gives customers with MIMIX, iTera or OMS/ODS estates direct access to an engineer who has supported these products at source for over a decade.

A word from Covenco

“Mark is exactly the kind of engineer our customers want on the other end of the line – calm, methodical, and genuinely experienced on the IBM i platform. His background in HA/DR replication, in particular, strengthens an area where good people are increasingly hard to find. We’re delighted he’s joined Covenco for the next chapter of his career.”
– Jonathan Short. Operations Director, Covenco.

About Covenco

Covenco has supported IBM Power and IBM i customers across the UK and Ireland since 1989. Our services span Managed Services, Disaster Recovery, Backup as a Service, and the supply of new and refurbished IBM Power, NetApp, Veeam and Cisco infrastructure. We are ISO 27001 certified and trusted by organisations that will not compromise on resilience or data security.

Talk to us

If your organisation is reviewing its IBM Power resilience, planning a Power10 refresh, or looking for a partner with the depth of expertise to support a mission-critical IBM i estate, we’d welcome a conversation.
Contact The Covenco IBM team by emailing enquiries@covenco.com.