The Business Value of IBM Maximo, a recent IDC report that surveyed 9 companies with an average of 8,500 employees, found that adopting IBM Maximo resulted in a business benefit of USD 14.6 million per year per organization, 43% less unplanned downtime, and USD 8.6 million in total equipment cost avoidances.
One comprehensive, cloud-based application platform for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance, and reliability planning is IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS). Maximo optimizes performance, extends asset lifecycles, and reduces downtime and costs for high-value assets using AI and analytics. Hosting Maximo on a scalable infrastructure maximizes performance, hence the current tendency is to shift it to the cloud. In this trip, MAS migration and deployment on AWS Cloud are gaining popularity.
The growing demand for Maximo AWS Cloud migration
Migrating to cloud helps enterprises improve operational resilience and dependability while updating software with minimal effort and infrastructure constraints. Due to the growing demand for data-driven asset management, firms must aggregate data from diverse departments to identify trends, generate predictions, and make better asset management decisions.
Last April, IBM said Maximo 7.6 and add-on support would stop in September 2025. All Maximo EAM customers must upgrade to the latest cloud-based MAS. Maximo migration and modernization are become increasingly significant to clients.
IBM has released new containerized versions of Maximo Application Suite as a Service (MAS SaaS) on AWS Marketplace with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) to assist Maximo migration to AWS. MAS SaaS on AWS is another milestone in Maximo’s integration of Monitor, Health, and Visual Inspection into a unified suite.
What makes MAS SaaS distinct
IBM Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) specialists use best practices to continuously maintain and administer MAS SaaS, a subscription-based AWS service. This partnership gives customers an industry-leading IBM asset management system underpinned by AWS’s size, agility, and cost-efficiency.
Upgrades and migrations to MAS 8 are possible with MAS SaaS. The data update is similar to prior upgrades, but ROSA and other dependencies require architecture changes. The migration is comparable to how clients transitioned from on-premise to Maximo EAM SaaS Flex, but with MAS changes. Perpetual on-premises customers would stop paying Service & Support (S&S) and purchase a SaaS subscription, on-premises Subscription License customers would start a new subscription, and existing MAS Flex and MAS Managed Service customers would start a new subscription to migrate to MAS SaaS.
Our IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator (ICCA) technology lets firms plan migration and upgrade strategies before investing.
Maximo migration strategy of a global energy firm
IBM worked closely with an energy company confronting the following challenges:
- Infrastructure needed for latest Maximo version takes longer.
- WebSphere, Maximo’s core, experienced high-availability and performance difficulties.
- Lack of data fabric and integration layer hinders cross-application data interchange.
- Complex setup, failures, and security with manual end-to-end deployment.
Since Maximo Application Suite 8 (MAS8) tackles industry issues like failure risk, escalating maintenance costs, sustainability, and compliance laws, the customer chose it. The client chose AWS Cloud for its deployment flexibility, scalability, high availability, and secure architecture.
Approach to solution
This is how IBM accelerated the energy company’s Maximo move to AWS:
- Used Infra as a code to upgrade Maximo from 7.6.0.9 to 7.6.1.2.
- IaC allowed instance spin-up for auto scaling. This automation reduces the time to spin up and execute the new environment and addresses multi-AWS availability zone deployment latency.
- Used AWS DMS for data migration and schema conversion.
- IaC spun the DR environment on demand to reduce database replication (DR) infrastructure and expense. DR capabilities update data in availability zone and DR area.
- Achieved data exchange across applications using IBM Cloud Pak for Data and standardized integration using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration components.
Solution components
- Maximum Enterprise Application Management (EAM) has a 3-tier design with these components:
- HTTP/Web Tier and Application Tier using IBM WebSphere and HIS installed EC2 instance under private subnet for application security.
- Database Tier uses AWS Oracle RDS with replication for DR under private subnet.
- AWS best practices were used to configure VPC with public and private subnets.
- Application servers and deployment manager were autoscaled by Auto Scaling Group.
- Maximum web-based UI resolution for external access using AWS Route 53.
- WAF was the initial line of defense against web exploits.
- Integration of Terraform and CFT IaC scripts provided autoscaling architecture.
AWS Reference Architecture
Max on RedHat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) helps clients
Containerized MAS 8.0 runs on RedHat OpenShift. AWS, IBM, and RedHat developed an IBM MAS on ROSA reference architecture to help customers inexperienced with production containerization. ROSA, a fully managed, turnkey application platform, supports IBM MAS configuration and offloads cluster lifecycle management to RedHat and AWS, allowing organizations to focus on application deployment and innovation. This means IBM MAS clients don’t need to develop, administer, or maintain RedHat OpenShift clusters.
Operating Model and Maximo Migration
Top 3 Maximo AWS migration accelerators
Clients can migrate to the cloud using three IBM MAS deployment methods on AWS Cloud:
- ROSA-powered MAS SaaS on AWS
- ROSA-powered AWS MAS
- Customer-hosted ROSA
Why use customer-hosted ROSA
The customer-hosted ROSA option for hosting IBM MAS in a customer’s VPC with ROSA is powerful. ROSA is perfect for MAS deployments because it seamlessly deploys, scales, and manages containerized applications.
The benefits of this choice are enormous. Full control over the infrastructure while still subject to the organization’s monitoring, controls, and governance standards allows businesses to customize and adjust the environment to their needs. This control includes adding MAS integrations and enforcing cloud security and governance requirements. ROSA charges are combined into one AWS bill and drawn from any AWS enterprise agreement, simplifying financial management.
AWS enterprise agreements and Compute Savings Plans offer infrastructure savings for MAS implementations. Because the ROSA cluster operates under the customer’s AWS account, customers can buy upfront ROSA contracts and get a one-year or three-year ROSA service charge discount.
Why IBM for Maximo AWS migration?
Any modernization effort must include cloud migration. Cloud migration is not a one-size-fits-all method, and each organization faces unique cloud adoption difficulties.
IBM Consulting’s Application Modernization offering helps clients migrate and modernize AWS applications faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, reducing technical debt and accelerating digital initiatives while minimizing business risk and improving business agility.
IBM offers unique cloud migration services to accelerate customer application migration to AWS:
Cloud migration factory capabilities including proven frameworks and processes, automation, migrating templates, security policies, and AWS-specific migration squads speed up delivery.
IBM Garage Methodology, IBM’s cloud services delivery capabilities, ROSA, and AWS Migration tools and accelerators accelerate migration and cloud adoption.
ICCA, IBM’s proprietary framework for migration and modernization, reduces risk. ICCA for AWS Cloud automates various modernization procedures, simplifying and speeding up company agility. Before investing, businesses can plan migration and modernization strategies. Discover IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator for AWS Cloud.
Our well-defined pattern-based migration methodology includes re-factor, re-platform, and containerization using AWS managed services and industry-leading tools to remove and optimize technical debt.
Finally, IBM offers customizable t-shirt-sized price models for small, medium, and large migration sizes, ensuring clients’ migration scope is obvious.
IBM helps clients migrate applications, like Maximo to AWS Cloud
In conclusion, clients seek IBM’s expertise to:
1.Upgrade Maximo 7.6x (expiring 2025) to MAS 8.
2.On-premise workload to AWS Cloud for elastic, scalable, and highly available infrastructure and runtime
IBM Consulting can help
AWS Premier Partner IBM Consulting accelerates hybrid cloud journeys on the AWS Cloud by leveraging business and IT transformation skills, processes, and tools from many industries. On AWS Cloud, IBM’s security, enterprise scalability, and open innovation with Red Hat OpenShift enable enterprises grow swiftly.
BM Consulting develops cloud-native apps in AWS Cloud with 21,000+ AWS-certified cloud practitioners, 17 validated SDD programs, and 16 AWS competencies. IBM Consulting is the best AWS partner due to acquisitions like Nordcloud and Taos, advancements at IBM Research, and co-development with AWS.
