Transport 2016

ESB platform migration and evolution for a national logistics operation

National logistics operator with high daily transaction volume

Enterprise ESB platform migration (WESB → IIB) in continuous production, with no operational interruptions

The challenge

The logistics operator had its service integration infrastructure built on IBM WESB, a platform that IBM had declared end-of-life and whose continued support represented a growing operational risk. The migration to IBM Integration Bus (IIB) had to be executed without interrupting the operation of applications that depended on the ESB — including shipment tracking applications and the corporate portal — and without wide maintenance windows in an operation that does not stop.

The solution

We designed and implemented an incremental migration strategy: services were migrated from WESB to IIB in functional groups, with both platforms coexisting during the transition and exhaustive testing of each service before activating it in production on the new platform. We also developed new applications on IIB for shipment tracking, leveraging the improved capabilities of the target platform. The KSoft team maintained operational responsibility for the ESB throughout the migration process and during the subsequent stabilization period.

Results

Complete WESB to IIB migration executed in continuous production
New shipment tracking applications developed and deployed on IIB
Reduced operational risk by eliminating dependency on an end-of-life platform
Continuous operation of portal and integration services throughout the transition

Enterprise middleware migrations in production are highly complex projects not because of the technologies involved, but because of the operational constraints: every service that is migrated has dependents that cannot fail, and the rollback plan must be ready and tested before each step is executed.

This project required deep knowledge of both platforms — source and target — and close coordination with the client’s application teams to validate that each migrated service behaved identically in production before retiring its previous version. The result was a critical infrastructure modernization executed without the operational impact this type of project typically generates.

Technologies

Services applied

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