Andromo vs. IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is clearly suitable for modernizing the WebSphere runtime from the heavy, complex and expensive WAS-ND, and to a lesser extent WAS-base, to the super simple, fast and lightweight WebSphere Liberty runtime. I guarantee, once you start using Liberty you'll never look back. Enough cannot be said about how awesome Transformation Advisor is. The output analysis it produces, along with the migration plan and associated artifacts, considerably simplifies both the decision-making process surrounding modernization and subsequent implementation. Without TA we would've made bad decisions by blindly picking unsuitable apps for moving from WAS to Liberty. Using the results from TA we've excluded multiple WAS apps from our immediate plans to migrate to Liberty, saving time and effort that probably would have resulted in a failed migration. We recently used Transformation Advisor to help us successfully migrate an app from Tomcat to WebSphere Liberty. We needed to make some changes to the Tomcat app, but TA helped highlight these required changes. Without TA I'm not sure we would have succeeded.

Incentivized

• WebSphere Liberty for lighter footprint
• Transformation Advisor
• Mono2Micro
• Customer can benefit from their investment by optimizing license offerings in IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

Incentivized

• While the licensing is considerably simplified than it used to be, I still find it somewhat confusing. For example, WebSphere Liberty Core has an 8:1 VPC ratio. This is clear when dealing with VMs but it is still not clear to me as to whether we get an 8:1 ratio when running on OpenShift or whether we need to purchase additional OpenShift licenses to support running WebSphere Liberty Core in OpenShift.
• Not so much related to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, but while Transformation Advisor is an indispensable tool to help modernize to the WebSphere Liberty runtime, I wish we could run it against WebSphere Liberty itself. The reason being, we are now using TA as a single repository for our configurations. TA also highlights many potential issues when migrating to Liberty; these issues may also be applicable for apps already running in Liberty, we just don't know it yet.

Incentivized

Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.

Incentivized

• Increased Development Efficiency
• Cost Reduction in Infrastructure Management
• Enhanced Application Performance and Reliability

Incentivized