As Maximo Manage evolves into a container-native platform, many of its supporting tools and development workflows are still tied to legacy technologies. One such tool is BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), which remains a core part of Maximo’s reporting capabilities—but it comes with some serious baggage.
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In this post, I’ll walk through the challenges of working with BIRT in modern environments and how containerizing the BIRT development environment solves not just one but many of those challenges.

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The Problem: Legacy Dependencies and Security Risks

Maximo Manage 8.x and 9.x (and previously 7.6.x) rely on different versions of BIRT—some of which are over seven years old. For example, BIRT 4.8, required by Maximo Manage 8.x through 9.0, depends on Java 1.8, which Oracle stopped supporting in January 2019.

This creates several problems:

• Security vulnerabilities: Java 1.8 no longer receives security patches, making it a potential attack vector

• Compliance issues: Running unsupported software can violate corporate security policies

• Environment conflicts: Java 1.8 can interfere with modern Java applications on the same machine

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The Solution: Containerization

To address these issues, I containerized the BIRT development environment using Podman, a rootless container engine. This approach brings a host of benefits:

Security and Isolation

• Java 1.8 runs only inside the container, never touching the host system
• Podman’s rootless mode and namespace isolation reduce the risk of privilege escalation or system compromise

Environment Consistency

• Every developer uses the same container image, eliminating “works on my machine” issues
• All required libraries, fonts, JDBC drivers, and configurations are pre-bundled

Developer Productivity

• Zero setup time: Developers can start working immediately by pulling and running the container
• Parallel development: Run multiple versions of Java or BIRT side-by-side without conflict
• Faster onboarding: New team members don’t need to spend hours configuring their environment

Cloud and CI/CD Integration

• Containers can be deployed directly into OpenShift, aligning with Maximo’s container-based architecture
• BIRT report generation can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment

Portability and Customization

• Containers run on any OS that supports Podman or Docker
• You can create client-specific images with preloaded reports and libraries, reducing setup time and ensuring consistency

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Aligning with Maximo’s Future

With Maximo Manage itself now running in containers, it makes perfect sense to bring the BIRT development environment into the same ecosystem. By containerizing BIRT:

• You reduce risk
• You improve developer experience
• You align with modern DevOps practices

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And perhaps most importantly, you future-proof your development workflow.

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Collaboration and Team Scalability

Another major advantage of containerizing the BIRT development environment is how it enhances collaboration across teams. By using a shared, version-controlled container image, teams can ensure that everyone—from developers to testers to DevOps engineers—is working in a consistent environment. This reduces miscommunication, simplifies troubleshooting and makes it easier to scale development efforts across multiple projects or clients. Whether you're onboarding new team members or collaborating across time zones, containers provide a reliable and reproducible foundation that keeps everyone aligned.

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Real World Example

During a recent project, we encountered an unexpected issue while developing reports for IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) Manage 9.0 using the containerised version of BIRT. Specifically, the report preview functionality failed to work—a problem that none of the other development teams had previously experienced.

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After some investigation, we discovered that the root cause was related to the report context created by the libraries bundled with the containerised BIRT environment. Although these libraries were technically correct, they introduced a subtle incompatibility with MAS Manage 9.0.

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The solution involved modifying the report to manually add a missing Maximo property to the report context. Interestingly, this issue hadn’t surfaced before because most reports for MAS 9 had been developed following IBM’s BIRT Development Guides. These guides link to library files intended for BIRT 8.x, which do not exhibit the same issue.

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This experience serves as a valuable reminder: development environments can vary significantly, and those differences can lead to unexpected issues later in the pipeline. It underscores the importance of validating tools and libraries in the specific context of your deployment environment—even when following official documentation.

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Legacy tools like BIRT don’t have to hold you back. With containerization, you can modernize your development environment without rewriting everything from scratch. It’s a practical, scalable solution that brings security, consistency, and flexibility to your Maximo reporting workflows.