IBM ACE

Helping all your systems to communicate with IBM Maximo^®

Many larger organisations have to deal with fragmented IT systems. This may come about through a variety of reasons, including mergers, different business unit policies, or partial upgrades.

One of the advantages of using IBM Maximo^® is that it helps you with managing diverse systems, including IT. However, this immediately raises the issue of how you can get information into IBM Maximo, from your various different systems.

Formerly, this was often achieved by ‘point-to-point’ communication, which involved making a direct connection between each system and Maximo^®. However, as the number of different systems grew, the number of potential connection interfaces between those systems rapidly became unmanageable.

This resulted in IBM developing their MQ ‘middleware’ system, based on a ‘hub and spoke’ model. This has grown over the last 30 years to be the Enterprise Service Bus (message and queue management) system of choice for many data-intensive industries such as banking and e-commerce.

IBM ACE (App Connect Enterprise) is the latest development within the IBM Message Broker family, which started out as ‘Neon Rules Formatter/MQSI’. The system can:

Be entirely hosted in the cloud
Enable messages to be received from a huge range of systems
Automatically convert incoming messages to Maximo’s format
Lower your development and implementation costs
Be expanded to easily integrate new systems
Enable faster implementation times
Be provided by IBM, the most established provider in the market

This means that most systems are able to connect directly to ACE, with minimal customisation. No authoring is required to convert messages to Maximo’s format, as that is all handled by IBM ACE for Maximo^®.

Peacock Queue Management tool for IBM Maximo^®

One important requirement of Maximo^® is that message processing order (message sequence) is critical to correct operation. Peacock Engineering has built our own tool, PQM (Peacock Queue Management) which works with IBM ACE and other ESBs.

PQM helps your company to:

Ensure that Maximo^® receives messages in the correct order
Prevent erroneous messages getting into Maximo
Avoid database problems
Maximise uptime for your system

PQM holds any messages which might cause problems, for example through incorrect formatting, or time zone inconsistencies.

Your operators can then decide what to do with the held messages – whether to pass them through, amend them, or contact the message source.

Stopping erroneous messages coming in to Maximo^® is an important element in keeping your Maximo^® database free of errors, and helps to maximise uptime for your system.

Peacock Engineering Enterprise Asset Management Solutions IBM ACE Professional Services

IBM ACE in your Industry

Many of Peacock Engineering’s clients use Enterprise Service Bus technology to manage message transfer and transformation between external systems, internal systems and Maximo^®. Peacock Engineering has implemented Maximo^® systems using MS BizTalk, Tibco, Oracle, and SAP technologies, as well as IBM ACE, as the basis of the integration bus.

For example, recently we implemented a high-volume message management system for a large UK Facility Management service provider. This system helps the company to:

Manage a range of connections to and from Maximo
Use Maximo^® as the hub and master record system
Process message volumes in excess of 250,000 per day

The system has scheduling, mobility, finance and ticket management integrations that produce message volumes in excess of 250,000 per day.

Our experience is that if your business is running Maximo, or considering it, for multi-site operations, you will have some requirement for using an ESB such as IBM ACE, in order to integrate your current systems with Maximo^® more easily.

Learn more about the benefits of IBM Maximo^® here.

Managed Cloud service - more information

Benefits of Managed Cloud service for your organisation

Focus your resources on improving system use and data quality while we use our expertise to manage your system.
Reduce total cost of ownership by using Peacock’s expertise to manage infrastructure and system support.
More cost effective licence model than the traditional on premise Maximo^® licencing.
Flexible product offering which provides support and environment provision options.
Guaranteed IT security – All environments provisioned using ISO 27001 certified infrastructure and procedures.

Go to the Managed Cloud page