On Monday, February 23, 2026, our EMEA team pushed a major European port live with IBM MAS Manage 9.1.7. The Maximo team on the project, including Ronald Francke, Dik Aanen, and Raf Van Camp, started preparations in September 2024. The starting point was a Maximo ICD 7.6.1.2 environment with the industry solutions SP and HSE. This environment had been in use for 15 years. During that time, numerous customizations had been implemented, ranging from automation scripts and custom Java code to database-level triggers and procedures.  

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The goal was to upgrade this environment to Maximo Manage 9.x, eliminating ICD, SP, and HSE in the process, while keeping all customizations intact.  

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This port hired a subcontractor to set up two OpenShift clusters: one non-production and one production. We started by installing Manage 9.0.3 and gradually upgraded to version 9.1.7, which would eventually be used for go-live.

Challenges

There were several challenges to address. First, we had to identify the configuration related to ICD, SP, and HSE so that it could be removed during the upgrade process, retaining only the standard Maximo configuration and the customizations implemented by the customer.  

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Secondly, the OpenShift clusters did not have internet access. As a result, we had to install MAS in an air-gapped environment, mirroring all images to a local registry.  

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There were also many legacy integrations. Some had already been converted to use the REST API framework, but others still relied on file-based data exchange and triggers and procedures on database level. The file locations of these integrations could not be changed, so we had to implement Samba-based persistent volumes to access these network locations from within OpenShift.

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Apart from legacy integrations, in parallel with the migration preparations, the customer had recently implemented a new financial system, which required many new processes and integrations to be designed and implemented. For some time, this project took priority, causing the originally planned MAS go-live in September 2025 to be postponed to February 2026.  

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During the migration preparation, development on Maximo 7.6 was not paused. Several new custom functionalities were implemented in Maximo 7.6 or prepared for MAS 9. These included, among others, the replacement of a legacy application with a new Maximo application used to track large contracts, focusing on the progress of work through to final payment.

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Another challenge was the required high availability of the system. Using multiple data centers, any planned or unplanned shutdown of a single data center should not impact the availability of MAS Manage beyond an acceptable level. Only 5 to 10 minutes of downtime would be tolerated. To achieve this, we implemented anti-affinity rules and topology spread constraints in OpenShift. This setup was tested multiple times by shutting down different data centers. After fine-tuning the rules — where some deployments, such as MongoDB, had to be distributed across three data centers — the results were excellent, with users experiencing little to no noticeable downtime.  

Migration

The entire migration process was tested multiple times. Finally, on Thursday February 19, 2026, Maximo 7.6.1.2 was shut down, and the migration process began. The upgrade was executed on Friday. On Saturday, key users conducted a final test of the production system and gave their approval around noon. The official go-live took place on Monday, February 23.  

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In the week following go-live, the system proved to be very stable and performed well. Apart from some inactive user accounts, a firewall issue, and a JMS continuous queue hiccup, no significant problems occurred. Performance was also not an issue. With 178 active user sessions at peak usage on the first day, distributed across four UI pods, response times were more than acceptable.

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Now, one week after go-live, the transition has proven to be very smooth. We can proudly say that with this major port, MAS 9 has truly set sail.