Middleware management

What is your weakest link in
Middleware Management?

IT and operations should be able to support business in order to compete in todays marketplace.

Middleware is complex and diverse by nature and part of your value chain. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the longer the chain, the more weak links. If your middleware is not highly available, reliable, high performing, manageable, standardized and reproducible, then the following remarks will sound familiar:

• IT Manager: Our application is developed by an external IT company. I have no idea how to maintain the application.
• Deployer: Where is the developer? I can not deploy the application on the production systems on my own.
• Operations manager: We are not able to reproduce the production issues quickly.
• Project manager: The application deployments are unpredictable. I can not guarantee anything.
• Developer: Application works on the development environment. I have no idea why it is not working on acceptance environment.
• Operations manager: I do not know if the middleware can handle the online discount action.
• IT manager: I can not guarantee a successful migration to the new middleware.
• Deployer: I can not keep up with the number of deployments. The project teams have adopted Agile / iterative methodologies.
• Supply manager: I have no control over the middleware environment.
• Operations manager: We have differences between acceptance and production environment and I can not explain why.

Not only the consumers of applications that rely on the middleware feel the pain when it is not performing well, but also the business managers, IT Managers, operations managers, project managers, application deployers and software developers. Everyone suffers when the middleware is of poor quality.

Immature middleware and its non-standardized management reveals itself at each level of the organization:

• The business manager cannot compete with the competitors since the applications have a long time-to-market because of the unhealthy middleware.
• The project managers cannot meet the project deadlines because of unpredictable and time consuming deployments.
• Operations spend too much valuable time on solving problems that occur because of lack communication and a well-defined release procedure between project teams and operations.
• Operations is not able to have a homogeneous pool of deployers because each application is delivered in a different way.
• The operations manager can not guarantee a stable, high performing middleware with predictable deployments.

Xebia has helped in arranging the middleware and its management at several large companies like Fortis, KLM, Achmea, NCCW, ANWB, UWV, Stater, Robeco, Siennax and Gemeente Amsterdam.

Xebia middleware specialists can help your organization with the following specialties:

• Setting up middleware environments in order to support development, test, acceptance and production environments.
• Defining IT operations guidelines
• Streamlining the process between development teams and IT operations
• Intake of applications on behalf of IT operations
• Automated deployment of applications
• Performance management of applications and middleware
• Migrating applications to new middleware

Execution of these steps deliver you:

1. Faster delivery and time to market
2. Lower development and maintenance costs
3. Lower cost of ownership

Since each organization has different business needs, Xebia middleware specialists will first do a quickscan in order to determine the maturity level of the middleware and the deployment process. By using the results of this quickscan, the next milestone and actions can be determined that are necessary to reach the next desired maturity level.