Rebuilding an Enterprise Integration Platform, One Cycle at a Time

The starting point

A large European packaging manufacturer runs its business on enterprise integration. SAP, messaging, file transfer, and the pipelines between them move the data that keeps plants and partners in sync. It worked. It also carried risk that only shows up on a bad day.

Core services leaned on short-term workarounds. Monitoring had gaps, so outages were found late and recovered by hand. A single node failure could block automatic recovery and stretch into real downtime. Credentials sat in configuration. Messages could be lost after pickup if the messaging layer failed, which quietly weakened end-to-end traceability. Underneath all of it, key middleware and database versions were drifting toward end of life.

How the partnership works

This is not a one-off migration. It is a long-running annual programme. Each year IGT Systems defines the scope of what the platform needs next and assigns a clear priority to each task, so the most important work is easy to identify. The client selects the work that fits that year's priorities. The platform never depends on a single large, risky program. It improves in prioritised, controllable steps, and gets measurably stronger each cycle, with the next one already on the horizon.

The three most recent cycles show the direction of travel:

The work, year over year

V3 made it reliable. The team moved the core services into containers, added health checks, and put deployments onto repeatable, Git-controlled pipelines. Credential handling was hardened and the gap that could lose a message after pickup was closed, so outages started raising tickets on their own instead of waiting to be noticed.

V4 made it resilient. Manual recovery was replaced with automatic failover. Storage was migrated so a replacement pod recovers cleanly when a node goes down. A monitored scheduler removed the risk of overlapping jobs, and the platform was lifted off an ageing host that threatened both builds and transfers.

V5 makes it supportable. Now completing, V5 moves the platform onto a vendor-supported webMethods 11.x baseline with official images, a consistent database, and governed secrets isolated by team. It also replaces retiring developer workstations with a modern cloud environment, protecting productivity through the transition.

Where it stands now

Today, more than 120 workloads across four environments are deployed and automatically recovered through GitOps.

Keep your platform ahead of its own risk

Ageing infrastructure rarely fails on a schedule. If your integration layer is one node failure or one end-of-life version away from a bad week, IGT Systems can scope and prioritise the fix so you improve what matters most, in the right order. Talk to us.

Related: our webMethods integration services and what webMethods Integration Server is.