Enhancing mission-critical government services

To kick-start the e-government initiative, the agency  turned to its trusted IBM Platinum Business Partner, PowerM. Working closely with stakeholders from the agency, PowerM proposed a new solution based on Cloud Pak for Applications —which provides cloud-native development and modernization options while maintaining support for existing applications. It includes IBM WebSphere Liberty—a modern, standards-based runtime designed for modernizing existing applications.

Walid Largou, Solutions Architect at PowerM, says: “One of the top drivers for our client was security. As a government entity, it’s vital that all core systems are patched against the latest information security vulnerabilities. With IBM WebSphere Liberty, the agency gets a fast, modular runtime that’s optimized for today’s API architectures and easy to manage. And thanks to IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition, we can continue to run existing applications without modernization.”

As the first step, PowerM performed a thorough audit of the government agency's existing IBM WebSphere platform, and created a complete inventory of all the applications running on each x86 server. Based on this report, the Business Partner helped the organization build an effective action plan to begin moving its applications to the new IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition environment, running on an IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper III server.

“By combining the latest IBM WebSphere Liberty solutions alongside existing WebSphere workloads, all on a highly secure and open server platform based on IBM LinuxONE, we enabled the agency to strengthen its cyber-security stance while shrinking the operational costs associated with the previous x86 environment,” recalls Walid Largou.

The introduction of WebSphere Liberty will also help reduce operational costs through its “zero migration” feature. This enables organizations to move up to the latest version of Liberty without having to change application code or configuration—avoiding the delay and expense of planning and risk-mitigation exercises. When new capabilities are introduced that might require an organization to migrate existing applications, Liberty continues to provide the previous code features alongside the new ones. Organizations can therefore update their Liberty environment and enjoy the latest runtime advantages without migrating all applications. Later—when they’re ready to take advantage of the latest APIs—they can separately update their server configurations and applications.

The government agency has now consolidated several x86 servers into a single IBM LinuxONE server with Integrated Facility for Linux [IFL] processors, virtualized with KVM. Walid Largou adds: “This was the first IBM LinuxONE deployment in the whole of Morocco, and it has significantly improved operational cost-efficiency for this government agency.”

By adopting Cloud Pak for Applications featuring the latest IBM WebSphere Liberty runtime, the agency has gained a secure, scalable platform to accelerate its e-government transformation. The hybrid nature of the solution means that the organization can continue to run older WebSphere workloads without modification, and plan for a seamless modernization at its own pace. Today, the agency runs 35 mission-critical IBM WebSphere Liberty applications on the new platform, including public-facing services—and IBM LinuxONE has now been running for two years without a single minute of unplanned downtime.

Walid Largou comments: “When we began working with the agency on the project to modernize the IBM WebSphere environment, we targeted an 8:1 reduction in licensing costs. By moving from x86 to IBM LinuxONE, we achieved a ratio of almost 12:1—delivering significant savings for the agency and excellent value for taxpayers.”

As a fully modular runtime, WebSphere Liberty enables organizations to pick and choose the capabilities and features they need for each application. This means that each application can be assigned precisely the compute resources it needs, helping to maximize cost efficiency. Equally, Liberty offers a “continuous delivery” release cycle in which a new release is shipped every four weeks, incorporating any fixes shipped for the previous release. Together with the zero migration feature, this ensures that the government agency can always run the latest version of IBM WebSphere Liberty, and can keep pace with the latest updates and patches with ease.

As part of the modernization exercise, the agency used IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor to analyze the complexity of its existing WebSphere applications and gain insights into the optimal target environments. In the future, the agency will use IBM Mono2Micro to harness AI-based, highly automated tools to refactor its monolithic Java applications into microservices on IBM WebSphere Liberty. It will also continue to use IBM Cloud Transformation Advisor to optimize the planning of future application modernization exercises.

“As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, we enjoy an excellent relationship with IBM, both in our domestic market and around the world,” concludes Walid Largou. “Our mission is to connect this government client to whatever resources they need to achieve their goals. We’re looking forward to working with them on the next phase of their transformation, supported by best-in-class IBM technology solutions.”

Based in Morocco, this government agency is responsible for a wide range of activities and public-facing services.

Headquartered in Casablanca, Morocco PowerM (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an IBM Platinum Business Partner with deep expertise in IBM WebSphere deployments. PowerM works with more than 90% of the organizations in Morocco that run IBM WebSphere applications—helping them to protect, modernize and optimize their technology platforms.