Leveraging unified observability and optimization to support secure, resilient IT services
As the German Armed Forces’ IT systems house, BWI GmbH is responsible for delivering secure, reliable, and mission-critical IT services in Germany and abroad. With approximately 1.15 million IT assets managed across several thousand servers and a workforce of over 8,000 employees, BWI operates one of the most complex and strategically important on-premises IT environments in Europe. To continue ensuring high performance and operational readiness, particularly in IT service delivery scenarios, BWI continuously evolves its IT operations to strengthen resilience, transparency, and long-term sustainability.
As application landscapes expanded and infrastructure environments grew in scale and complexity, BWI identified an opportunity to further enhance visibility into IT resource usage and service performance. In the context of volatile hardware markets and time-consuming procurement cycles, improved transparency and data-driven capacity planning became increasingly important to maximize the value of existing infrastructure while maintaining full control and sovereignty. To support this strategic direction, BWI embarked on a long-term journey to enhance its IT operations; focusing on proactive service management, intelligent automation, and informed decision making, working with a partner that could provide both proven technology and deep expertise aligned with its governance and security requirements.
To act on its strategic opportunity, BWI partnered with IBM to establish a unified, intelligent foundation for IT operations; focused on simplifying how teams observe, manage, and optimize complex, mission IT critical environments. Beginning in 2022, BWI set out to connect observability, performance insights, and operational workflows into a shared operational intelligence layer that would support faster, more informed decision making under human control. The goal was not to accumulate additional tools, but to align insight, action, and governance across BWI’s existing IT landscape.
BWI began designing and implementing its own on-premises unified automation platform, tailored to its security, sovereignty, and scale requirements. The platform combines real-time observability, intelligent resource optimization, and policy-driven automation, with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform serving as a central automation layer. Ansible plays a key role in standardizing workflows, enabling repeatable automation, and supporting a shift from manual administration toward more engineered, resilient operations.
Through a structured proof of value, BWI validated how IBM® Instana Observability® and IBM Turbonomic®, now both part of the IBM Concert® platform, work together within this unified operational model. Instana provides real-time, automated visibility across applications and infrastructure, while Turbonomic builds on this insight with continuous, policy-driven recommendations to align capacity and placement with real-time application demand. Together, they give operations teams a shared, contextual view that links system behavior with effective resource management.
This integrated approach allows BWI to advance automation in a controlled and accountable way. Existing AIOps and Netcool Operations Insights (NOI) capabilities contribute to proactive detection and analysis, while automation actions remain governed through clear policies, approvals, audit trails, and safe rollback mechanisms. Intelligent assistants, AI-based capabilities that support investigation and recommend next steps; operate under human oversight, ensuring explainability, accountability, and full operational sovereignty.
IBM Expert Labs supported architecture design, implementation, and operational enablement, helping BWI deploy and integrate these capabilities reliably across large, fully on-premises environments. Together, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Ansible, and AIOps capabilities form a unified operational intelligence and automation foundation that delivers operational value today, while providing a future-ready path toward more advanced, agent-assisted automation as part of BWI’s long-term roadmap.
By strengthening observability across its IT landscape, BWI has enhanced how it manages and delivers mission-critical services for the German Armed Forces. Realtime visibility across applications and infrastructure gives operations teams a clearer understanding of system behavior and dependencies, enabling faster, more confident responses in complex, fully on-premises environments. This shared operational view supports consistent decision-making and reinforces service stability under demanding conditions.
With this increased visibility, BWI has shifted from reactive troubleshooting to more proactive service management. Potential issues can now be identified and addressed earlier in their lifecycle, helping BWI avoid or proactively handle approximately 30,000 actual and potential IT service disruptions annually. This approach improves service reliability for end users while allowing operations teams to resolve issues more efficiently and focus on higher-value initiatives that support continuous improvement.
Improved insight into infrastructure utilization has also strengthened BWI’s planning and capacitym-anagement capabilities. In specific environments, BWI has identified up to 35% potential capacity that can be freed and used more effectively, enabling the organization to delay hardware procurement by up to 12 months where appropriate. Together, these outcomes have strengthened BWI’s operational resilience and provided a solid foundation for ongoing evolution, positioning the organization to expand automation in a controlled, governed manner while maintaining human oversight, accountability, and full operational sovereignty
BWI is one of the largest IT service companies in Germany, providing stable, secure and efficient IT services to the German Armed Forces. Founded in 2006, BWI has significantly expanded its service portfolio to include expert consulting services and rapid development of new IT solutions. With over 8,000 employees, BWI is committed to advancing the digitalization of the German Armed Forces and ensuring their operational readiness.
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