This post was written with the help of Alex Donatelli (IBM).

IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) is an integrated solution for asset monitoring, management, predictive maintenance, and reliability planning. MAS customers can deploy MAS anywhere OpenShift can be deployed - whether it is on-prem, or on a public cloud of their choice (either as Red Hat managed or self managed).

The objective of this blog post is to show customers the value of running MAS. We discuss the motivation for MAS to be architected on OpenShift. We show how to install MAS on OpenShift using the Maximo Operator by leveraging MAS CLI. We demonstrate a sample application on MAS by showcasing the IBM Maximo Health application.

Background

EAM

Maximo Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) provides an integrated approach to managing discrete or complex assets. Some of the capabilities include work management, asset management, supply chain management, planning, and scheduling.

MAS

Applications available in this integrated Maximo Application Suite (MAS) include  Maximo Manage (CMMS/EAM), Maximo Monitor, Maximo Visual Inspection, Maximo Health, Maximo Predict, and Maximo Mobile. By maintaining assets using Maximo EAM, customers will be able to Manage assets using Maximo Application Suite.

End of support for all IBM Maximo Asset Management 7.6.1.x (EAM) and compatible versions of products, including industry solutions and add-ons, was announced. Effective 30 September 2025, regular base support is no longer provided for Maximo 7.6.1.x. Customers have the option to purchase one year of Extended and up to five years of Sustained Support. For additional details, please visit the IBM Extended and Sustained Support page.The strategic direction is for customers to move towards MAS.

Some of the technical changes from EAM to MAS include:

• moving the infrastructure to OpenShift and using Operators to install, deploy, configure environment, customize deployment, upgrade
• for security and user management - migrating to MAS authentication
• for app server - using WAS Liberty instead of WAS ND and WebLogic
• for integration- using REST API instead of Remote Method Invocation
• for messaging queues - Added Kafka support and lightweight  JMS providers in addition to those supported in EAM (for example IBM MQ)

Customers also get options like new mobile experience, modern user experience, improved logging options (Elasticsearch, Fluentd & Kibana) & monitoring options (Prometheus & Grafana).

OpenShift benefits

The Enterprise Asset Management discipline has changed recently, thanks to the introduction of innovations like the Internet of Things, AI, etc. Preventive Maintenance is not any more an acceptable way to handle the asset lifecycle. There is opportunity to expand into monitoring the health of the asset, to gather more data points about it via sensors and/or visually, to predict how those will evolve in the future to better plan how to handle the asset for maintenance and operations. Similar capability is needed for all the related aspects to asset management, like work and purchase management. All such additional functional power should be made available via mobile devices to a workforce that is dispersed in the field. This is why Maximo EAM was expanded into the Maximo Application Suite, to deliver the additional capability of a modern and complete asset management solution. The picture below summarizes this functional expansion and reminds the links among the various key solutions.

These impactful features of MAS come at the cost of increased complexity compared to Maximo EAM, which is a simple J2EE application. So a traditional IT environment might not be able to manage MAS due to the complexity of implementation. OpenShift is a perfect platform to host MAS and provides all the required services to achieve the level of integration, security, monitoring and automation on all the modern hosting environments either on-premises or in the most common clouds. OpenShift handles everything from the ground up and provides great insulation layers to applications like MAS. This allows such applications to concentrate on their functionality and leverage the available services to deliver state of the art integrated operations.

OpenShift brings a lot of great benefits like reduced infrastructure spend, faster application deployment cycle, secure production ready containers, consistency across hybrid cloud. That makes OpenShift the platform of choice to deliver MAS.

One of the advantages of OpenShift is that it enables MAS to deliver a set of integrated services to operate the product in the IT environment. Prior to implementing OpenShift, each client had to figure out how to operate Maximo EAM successfully. MAS internalized the common operations by automating them using the Operators functionality of OpenShift. All the MAS operations are operator based, and the product team is committed to continue to improve the maturity of the MAS operators to deliver the highest level of automation and efficiency as identified by the operator maturity phases.

A single node version of MAS is now a reality because of IBM-Red Hat collaboration. This is an additional benefit of having adopted OpenShift for MAS and there is a continuous focus on reducing the overall footprint and resources’ demand to improve the efficiency.

Installation of OpenShift on on-prem

If you like the OpenShift installer to automatically provision the infrastructure for you, then use an IPI based approach.

For clusters with networks connected to the internet, the Assisted Installer which comes with a web based interactive approach is an easy way to install OpenShift.  

If it is a disconnected installation of OpenShift, use an Agent based installer approach.

If you like to manually deploy the machines that your cluster requires during the installation process and have more control on the infrastructure, use the User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI) approach.

Installation of OpenShift on Hyperscalers

On Hyperscalers, customers have the option of a Red Hat Managed OpenShift environment (like ROSA, ARO etc).

Customers also have the option of a self managed OpenShift environment where they can install OpenShift on the Hyperscalers using Installer Provisioned Infrastructure/User Provisioned Infrastructure - refer this documentation. 

Installation of MAS

One of the ways for installation of MAS is using the MAS CLI.

The MAS CLI is an opinionated simple way of installing/updating/managing MAS.

With MAS CLI, users have the flexibility to customize MAS installation - customize which MAS applications (IoT, Visual Inspection, Optimizer, Assist, Manage etc) to install, configure databases, operation mode (non prod/prod). MAS can be installed in a disconnected manner as well using the MAS CLI. The MAS CLI uses the Ansible DevOps Collection for IBM Maximo Application Suite that can be leveraged to create tailored automated installations.

You will need an IBM Entitlement key, MAS License file.

• https://ibm-mas.github.io/cli/guides/install/#1-pre-requisites

You also need a running OpenShift cluster ready - whether it is on prem or on a public cloud.

Installation of MAS using MAS CLI can be run either in an interactive mode or non interactive mode.

• https://github.com/ibm-mas/cli/blob/master/docs/commands/install.md#examples

Based on the user selected options, MAS CLI triggers installation of MAS using OpenShift Pipelines.

Sample application on MAS

Customers can use the catalog on the MAS web interface to deploy applications.

MAS Health application can be deployed from the catalog.

It can be used with or without MAS Manage to achieve specific business objectives like:

• Reduce fleetwide operational risk by focussing on the right assets.
• Increase asset availability.
• Reduce unnecessary preventive maintenance.
• Reduce time to make capital replacement planning decisions.
• The Maximo Health solution enables.
• Consolidated global view of assets.
• Health Visibility and Analysis.
• Condition based actions.
• Replacement planning.

The Asset Performance Management solution includes, above and beyond Health, Maximo Predict that allows users to:

• Build asset failure models.
• Predict failures.
• Determine factors that contribute to failure.
• Score models with current sensor data.

With all the solutions that are part of MAS, you can use existing manufacturing data like work orders, data from sensors, PLCs etc and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain insights.

MAS brings operations, maintenance and reliability all together in one suite.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the value of MAS workloads which run on OpenShift. We showed how to install MAS on OpenShift and showcased the MAS Health application. You can check out the demos/try out MAS on https://www.ibm.com/products/maximo.

Please reach out to your account teams from Red Hat or IBM for more information.