Customer Background

Our customer is a trust worthy manufacturer and retailer of leading basic apparel under some of the world's effective apparel brands. Our customer has companies in various parts of Europe and Eastern Europe, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain.

Technology Used

The products and technologies used in this effort by our team and the customer were,

• IBM Integration Bus v10
• IBM MQ v8
• IBM WebSphere Message Broker v6.1.03
• IBM DB2 v10

The Business Requirement

With evolving integration needs and limited functionality with existing IBM product set, our customer wanted to upgrade and migrate to higher versions of the products to harness the maximum benefits of technology in current environment and respond quickly to market trends. To enable this, customer wanted the following,

• Monitor business transactions in IBM Integration Bus, track and report the lifecycle of a payload message through an end-to-end enterprise transaction
• Universal connectivity includes standards, de facto standards, industry and custom systems
• Support Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), auditing or data capture for potential later replay
• Exposing and invoking RESTful services using an Enterprise Service Bus
• The existing IBM tool version was obsolete and even IBM is not supporting those products, so migration to advance version of the IBM product was mandatory
• IBM Integration Bus surpasses Open Source and commercial competition with superior performance and usability

Migration Activity

To support the business requirements of the customer's integration platform the following migration and upgrade activities were executed by our team successfully,

• Migration of IBM Message Broker from version 6.1.0.3 to IBM Integration Bus 10.0.0.3
• Upgrade of IBM WebSphere MQ from version 7.0.1.2 to version 8.0.0.4
• Upgrade of IBM WebSphere DB2 from version 9.1 to version 10.5.0.7

Our Solution and Support

Miracle has a rich history of delivering innovative and cost effective solutions around IBM's Integration Product Set including being awarded multiple times as a leader in the space of SOA, Connectivity and Middleware. Over the last 16 years we have partnered with IBM on numerous engagements and have helped customers enable themselves with robust and future-enabled integration platforms.

Our team was able to quickly understand the needs of the customer and deliver with high standards of service. The migration and upgrade team consisted of two admins and two developers, who analyzed the current configurations of MB, MQ and DB2 to make sure that we have a perfect understanding of all the dependent artifacts.

The entire effort took around 16 to 20 weeks within the development environment, with another 4 to 6 weeks of time to check the development testing results in QA environment and finally push to the production environment.

Customer Benefits

Some of the features and benefits that the customer experienced after the migration to IIB were,

• WebSphere MQ is no longer a prerequisite for using IBM Integration Bus on distributed platforms, which means that they can develop and deploy applications independently of WebSphere MQ - They can also run and administer integration nodes without requiring the WebSphere MQ Explorer
• Efficient and scalable caching using ESQL shared variables in IBM Integration Bus was possible
• DFDL can be used as SOA artifacts and can be used with other WebSphere product due to its open standard feature
• Ability to reprocess the failure message by implementing record and replay feature
• Quickly get started with a radically simplified, single-package installation and improved support for unit test
• Flexibly interact with WebSphere MQ using connection policies
• Simplify administration of Integration Bus by using the improved web browser user interface which includes new capabilities for deployment, creating, editing and attaching policy documents
• Rapidly create REST APIs and use the new, graphical data mapper to support the transformation of un-modelled data structures
• Reuse common resources, such as message models, sub flows, Java, and ESQL code in shared libraries
• REST API can be called from any HTTP client, including client-side JavaScript code that is running in a web browser