Maximo and DB2 on the Cloud

Maximo in the cloud using DB2! Maximo is IBM's Enterprise Asset Management technology and I just happen to work in the same office as a very talented Maximo hosting team. The Maximo hosting team recently put Maximo on Amazon's EC2 following in the footsteps of other IBM software.

Why is this significant for a DB2 blog? Maximo requires a database and DB2 (IBM’s leading database product) was ready to use in minutes on Amazon’s EC2. The Maximo team was able to use the existing DB2 AMI to get Maximo up and running very quickly without having to install DB2 from scratch. It is a great proof point for vendors who are looking to get up and running quickly with an enterprise database on Amazon.

The Maximo on Amazon discussion started a couple weeks ago during a Maximo/DB2 collaboration meeting. DB2 was already on Amazon (as was WebSphere) and the Maximo hosting team was ironically already providing much of what Cloud Computing offers. They install, configure and manage Maximo for clients around the world and are well known experts within IBM. With Maximo hosting, the details of the technology (including hardware and software) are not exposed to clients. This allows clients to focus more on their business instead of technology. It is the text-book SaaS model. Moving to a IaaS cloud was almost a step backward for this team!

Greg Rozon from the Maximo hosting team took the lead and got Maximo working on Amazon.  Utilizing IBM's existing AMIs for DB2 and WebSphere Application Server, he quickly built a Maximo-capable infrastructure using Amazon's smallest (and least expensive) EC2 instance type.  The resulting Maximo deployment was both responsive and well-suited to a small implementation or development project. Here is a screen cap of Maximo running on Amazon:

Maximo on Amazon is a great opportunity for clients to get up and running on the Maximo Asset Management platform very quickly.  There is no wait for hardware procurement, rack and stack, power and network, and it pretty much eliminates growth challenges.  The pay as you grow model allows the client or vendor to focus on business process and on user adoption rather than technical and scalability challenges. The public cloud model is also attractive for Asset Management due to the world-wide availability of Amazon’s public cloud (compared to an internal deployment).

DB2 is ready for business on the cloud and Maximo is yet another proof point!

- Mark Wilding (mwilding <.at.> ca.ibm.com), Cloud Architect for DB2 on Linux, Unix and Window

Comments

[Mark wilding]

Absolutely... I sit with the Maximo hosting team that is putting Maximo on the cloud. They are quite a team. And yes... DB2 does a wonderful job as the DB for Maximo. The two products make a great solution.

[kaithy]

Maximo software is a great opportunity for clients to get up and running on the Maximo Asset Management platform very quickly but it become more powerful when it use with DB2.

As we know Db2 is a powerful Data Base to manage the heavy application with DB.