The R Co Story
A fictitious company with a very real purpose — demonstrating how IBM enterprise software works in the wild.
The Origin
R Co is a fictitious enterprise created by Frank Welder — IBM Domain Architect at Arrow ECS — as the proving ground for the Arrow Capability Engine (ACE). ACE is the IBM-specific capability engine within the broader Arrow Experience Center (AEC): Arrow's multi-manufacturer showcase organization covering partners across the full Arrow family of suppliers. ACE began in 2019 as the Arrow Cybersecurity Environment for IBM — a focused proving ground for IBM security products like QRadar and Guardium. As IBM's own strategy evolved toward Data & AI, Automation, and Systems & Storage, so did ACE — until the acronym itself needed a new meaning. Today, ACE stands for Arrow Capability Engine: the live IBM proving ground operating inside AEC, powered by R Co.
The Evolution
ACE started narrow — a handful of IBM security products running in a lab, documented quietly, shared internally. Over five years it expanded program by program: Q-Forge brought quantum-safe cryptography, Atlas built the multi-cloud infrastructure foundation, Watson Experience added AI and automation, and IBM Bob transformed how the work itself gets done. Each program mirrors IBM's own strategic pillars — Data & AI, Automation, Systems & Storage — because Arrow's IBM Group lives and works inside IBM's go-to-market, not alongside it. The domain name never changed. The ambition did.
The Metaphor
The best way to understand enterprise software is to see it in action — not in a vendor slide, not in a lab that gets torn down after the demo. R Co is a living, breathing fictional company with real infrastructure, real deployments, and real problems that IBM software solves on camera. Every use case on this site is a real engineering problem that Bob helped solve alongside a real Arrow ECS engineer. Our guiding principle, internally and externally, is the same: Show, not Tell.
The Public Mission
This site exists because Arrow's IBM Group believes that the best sales pitch is proof. Our ecosystem of Arrow partners, IBM field teams, and enterprise customers can review our public code, study our architectures, and reproduce our deployments — no NDA, no vendor pitch, no gatekeeping. Frank Welder operates ACE within Arrow ECS's IBM Business Unit, which means every program here reflects how Arrow actually delivers IBM outcomes to customers. What you see on rcoace.com is what Arrow's IBM practice looks like in production.