Joe
Zarrehparvar

Walk into most tech conversations in 2024 and you'll hear two things about IBM i (the operating system formerly known as AS/400): that it's ancient, and that it runs more of the world's commerce than anyone wants to admit. Joe Zarrehparvar knows both of these things and built a career around the gap between them.

He arrived at Fresche Solutions in May 2023, stepping into the President and CEO role after nearly a decade running Wicresoft International. Before that, Microsoft. Before that, Juniper Networks during the Cisco wars. Before all of it, he co-founded Trevoli in 2002 - one of the earliest SaaS software companies - at the worst possible moment, right after the Dot-Com Bust had incinerated investor confidence across the sector. He raised money anyway. The company shipped.

That pattern - building things when conditions seem wrong, finding the value hiding inside systems others have written off - defines everything Zarrehparvar does at Fresche. Where most tech executives are selling clients on the next platform, he is adamant about something different: "We are not pushing them on or off a platform." In an industry that profits from migration anxiety, that's a contrarian bet.

Fresche Solutions was founded in 1976 - which means it predates the IBM PC. It predates the Mac. It predates the internet as a commercial proposition. And it has outlasted all of the predictions about its own obsolescence. When American Pacific Group acquired it in December 2020, the company had already completed multiple strategic acquisitions of its own. Under Zarrehparvar, that consolidation has accelerated. Seven acquisitions total. A client base of 22,000 organizations spanning financial services, manufacturing, retail, and beyond.

The pitch is not sentimental nostalgia for legacy code. The pitch is economics. Thousands of enterprises are running IBM i systems that work - systems embedded deep enough in operations that "just migrate to AWS" is not a sentence spoken by anyone who has actually looked at the codebase. Zarrehparvar's insight: those companies need a trusted partner who can modernize what they have, not a vendor pushing them toward an exit that may never make financial sense.

Zarrehparvar studied Electrical Engineering at Manchester College in England and earned an O.N.D. from Wythenshawe College of Further Education before crossing the Atlantic for a Master's in Engineering Management at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. By 1994, he was at Microsoft in a General Manager role for Global Services - which means he was inside the building when the company was having serious internal debates about whether a browser made by a company called Netscape was even worth taking seriously. He watched those decisions get made. He saw how technical overconfidence and strategic myopia can define a company's next decade.

Seven years at Microsoft. Then Trevoli in 2002 - a co-founded SaaS startup targeting commercial retailers at a time when the acronym "SaaS" hadn't even fully entered the vocabulary. The company ran for six years, which in post-Dot-Com timing is closer to a decade. Then Juniper Networks, where he led the Data Center Business Unit engineering team during the period when Juniper was seriously competing with Cisco for the soul of enterprise networking. Then shorter stints at Columbus A/S as Executive Vice President, North America, and at Avanade in sales leadership.

The longest chapter before Fresche: eight years as CEO of Wicresoft International, a Microsoft partner and IT services firm where he directed strategic direction, led acquisitions, and built sustained engineering practices. By the time he stepped down in May 2023, Wicresoft was a substantially different company than the one he inherited. That track record of patient, operational building - not disruptive pivoting - is exactly what Fresche's board was buying when they appointed him.

The strategic bet Zarrehparvar is making at Fresche has a very specific shape in 2025: AI-powered modernization tools that dramatically reduce the time and cost of transforming IBM i applications. In November 2025, Fresche launched X-Modernize AI - a platform that promises 50% faster application conversion. "AI-powered X-Analysis is more than a tool - it's a partner in your modernization journey," he said at the launch. The language is deliberate. Not a replacement. Not a disruption. A partner.

That framing - AI as augmentation rather than substitution - runs consistently through Zarrehparvar's public statements. When he launched AI-Celerate in October 2024, an advisory service designed to help enterprises measure AI ROI on IBM i systems, he was notably measured about expectations: understand what AI can do, understand what it can't, begin with internal experimentation before scaling. In a moment when every tech company was racing to slap "AI" onto its marketing materials, he was telling clients to slow down and do the math first.

The subscription pricing model is another signal. Under his leadership, Fresche has moved toward "unlimited support" subscriptions - the telecom analogy is apt. Just as phone carriers replaced per-minute billing with unlimited data plans, Zarrehparvar is replacing traditional maintenance contract structures with predictable, service-oriented relationships. It sounds like a billing change. It's actually a statement about what kind of company Fresche wants to be.

Strategic partnerships have followed the same disciplined logic. An IBM partnership for PowerVS Managed Services in March 2025. An OmniData partnership for data modernization - "a pivotal moment in our mission to reimagine data modernization," he called it. FalconStor for IBM i Data Backup in May 2025. None of these are flashy pivots. All of them extend the same core value proposition: Fresche as the platform-neutral, full-spectrum partner that enterprise clients can trust across a 10-year modernization horizon.

The IT Jungle headline from August 2023 - just three months into his Fresche tenure - put it cleanly: "With Fresche's New CEO, There Are No Problems, Just Solutions." That's a play on the company name, but it's also an accurate description of how Zarrehparvar operates. He is allergic to the vendor lock-in pitch. He does not arrive at client conversations with a predetermined destination. He arrives with diagnostic questions.

"Our clients operate in complex, multi-platform environments that require secure and reliable solutions, whether on-premise, private cloud, or across hybrid infrastructures like Microsoft Azure," he has said. The statement sounds like boilerplate. Read it again: on-premise, private cloud, hybrid. All three. Simultaneously. That's not a company trying to migrate everyone to one destination. That's a company trying to serve clients where they actually are.

The culture piece matters too. When Fresche was named One of Canada's Top Small and Medium Employers for both 2024 and 2025, Zarrehparvar framed it in terms of talent: "This honor is a reflection of our position not only as a leader in IT solutions but as a home for aspiring tech professionals seeking excellence and career progression." In an industry that competes fiercely for people who understand legacy systems deeply enough to actually modernize them, keeping your best engineers is not a nice-to-have. It's the product.