When it is Black Friday and many of the world’s top retailers rely on your solution to conduct their business, your solution better perform. During the 2024 holiday season, the IBM Sterling® Order Management software (OMS) team used the IBM Instana® Observability solution to maintain excellent performance and help smash order and revenue records.
The SaaS version of IBM Sterling OMS facilitates real-time order and inventory management for many brands that are household names in the US and internationally, from massive online marketplaces to popular shops for fashion apparel and children’s gifts. For these companies, if the OMS system falters, even for a minute, it is money lost; during Black Friday or other seasonal peaks, it could be millions.
The Sterling OMS team at IBM understands what is at stake, and it commits to a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.9999% uptime for customers. But making good on this SLA is no simple task.
IBM Sterling OMS SaaS technology stack
- Database components: IBM® Db2®, NoSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search
- Messaging: IBM MQ, Kafka
- Software defined networking (SDN): Istio Service Mesh
- Apache Spark and Iceberg Data Lakehouse to support AI workloads
- 20+ IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service clusters, 900+ worker nodes, 60,000 active containers
- Large Language Model (LLM) AI use cases to enhance services for call centers
The OMS SaaS product suite supports over 400 customizable environments, incorporating a diverse array of multi-tenant microservices that scale both horizontally and vertically. “To ensure customers can run real-time eCommerce workloads seamlessly,” says Sachin Sethiya, Program Director of Order Management and Development at IBM, “each environment and microservice must maintain high availability and reliability. Monitoring such a complex system—featuring hundreds of inbound and outbound integrations—is a significant challenge.” To tackle this, OMS leveraged Instana to deliver comprehensive observability for each integration and touchpoint.