A large US-based healthcare company engaged with IBM® to accelerate their cloud modernization with consistent and predictable outcomes. This collaboration enhanced their confidence to navigate app modernization across various applications and landing zones for both hybrid cloud and platform-native modernization.

As a healthcare company, this client had an obligation to provide safe, reliable, time-sensitive, high-quality services to its customers. Ultimately, they needed best-in-class application modernization tooling to help  deliver on that obligation.

When a client is not able to properly visualize all applications and their underlying dependencies properly, they risk experiencing diminished reliability. Managing large internal and vendor teams to maintain multiple applications can be extremely difficult. To accelerate the hybrid cloud journey and control costs, it is critical to prioritize specific execution and transformation steps. 

How IBM helped improve the app modernization strategy

IBM Consulting® worked with the client’s cloud team and technical experts to deploy IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator, which helped them understand the business logic surrounding their many applications. The solutions deployed included Cloud Transformation Insights (CTI), Analysis and Renovation Catalyst (ARC), Mainframe Application Modernizer (MAM) and Candidate Microservice Advisor (CMA).

IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator understands complex program interactions in the current state of applications and microservices and can perform a what-if analysis of possible target states. It provides flexibility to choose what applications to move and when to move them based on business imperatives. It also helps to enable consistency and provides an accelerated modernization process end-to-end, from rapid discovery to solutioning and low-touch delivery.

Hybrid cloud migration with predictable outcomes and lower risk

The client was able to leverage a repository that provides a collaborative environment where multiple resources can search, modify and test the business rules by ingesting extracted business rules.

The IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator also provided a detailed discovery of mainframe applications. These improvements are further underscored by the solution’s automated discovery of dead code or unreachable code and its ability to identify microservices in potential target states.

IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator integrates and orchestrates a wide range of migration tools across IBM’s assets and products, as well as open source, and third-party tools. IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator offers these  capabilities:

• Cloud transformation planning: Create a wave plan for migration and modernization workloads to the cloud.
• Application and workload analysis:  Collect infrastructure, app data and target state preferences. Produce cloud modernization paths that are optimized for time, cost and business benefits.
• Migrate, modernize and build capabilities:  Migrate workloads to the cloud or develop new applications natively on the cloud with our automation-first, journey-based approach with low-touch factory squads to deliver predictable outcomes.
• Application and platform design: Create technical blueprints to help guide the implementation of consistent experiences across multiple cloud platforms and services.
• Cloud services configuration: Automate the build-out and configuration of the cloud platform and the required cloud services for application workloads.
• Day 2 operations:  Drive consistency in cloud operations in a vendor agnostic manner, regardless of choices in cloud providers or landing zones.
• Co-creation with IBM Garage™:  Ideate, build, measure, iterate and scale solutions seamlessly with our end-to-end framework of design thinking, agile and DevOps practices. Achieve speed-to-value and adopt breakthrough technologies through the partnerships between your team and a diverse set of IBM technology, business and design experts.

IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator enabled the healthcare company by deploying IBM hybrid-cloud capabilities across the client’s locations in a cost-effective manner. This allowed them to deliver higher-quality health outcomes to their customers. The company is now expanding to additional use cases as a result of their collaboration and innovation with the IBM Consulting team.

We believe that this engagement reflects the IBM values of client dedication and innovation that matters. It is our honor and privilege to provide value to our clients. IBM’s mission is to harness the power of data and hybrid cloud to drive real-time, predictive business insights that help clients make intelligent business decisions.