The bank is using its new agile DevOps approach to bring new services to market faster, helping it to carve out a competitive edge. Now that the modernization phase is complete, the organization can fully exploit cloud-native development.
“By combining IBM WebSphere Liberty with MicroProfile and Red Hat OpenShift, we were able to slash deployment times,” recalls Pfeifer. “For instance, the bank was able to roll out new features for its fund management services app in minutes rather than months. The organization can now innovate at pace with FinTechs and other competitors, helping it retain and grow its market share. Cloud-native development and delivery is a key differentiator for the bank.”
By taking advantage of built-in features within IBM WebSphere Liberty, the bank is empowering developers with powerful new capabilities while controlling cost and complexity. Pfeifer explains: “The organization’s DevOps pipeline automatically uses the latest release of IBM WebSphere Liberty, ensuring they have the latest features and fixes. Thanks to Liberty’s zero-migration architecture, the applications work unmodified with each new Liberty release. Using another runtime would force the bank into additional migrations, so it’s a huge time-saver and at the same time helps keep the applications secure.”
Liberty’s zero-migration architecture also allows the organization to adopt newer features for different applications at its own pace. For its slower evolving microservices, the bank has remained on Java EE, while adopting the latest Jakarta EE support for faster moving microservices. The same latest, secure releases of IBM WebSphere Liberty run both with ease. Other runtimes would force the organization to migrate all its applications or remain on older, insecure versions.
The bank is now in the process of moving its traditional IBM WebSphere Application Server workloads from a mainframe to a distributed server environment, confident that its IBM WebSphere Liberty and Red Hat OpenShift platform will continue to yield benefits over the long term.
Pfeifer concludes: “At RedBridge, we help companies use open source technology to their full potential. Our work with this large European bank demonstrates that IBM’s solutions in this space can help organizations bring their services into the future.”