IBM® Sterling Order Management on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Businesses today face increasing complexities in managing modern commerce, driven by the need to provide unified omni-channel experiences, improve operational performance, and consistently exceed customer expectations. To meet these demands, enterprises rely on advanced Order Management Systems (OMS). These systems are essential for orchestrating intricate order lifecycles across diverse sales channels, maintaining accurate and real-time inventory insights, streamlining fulfillment processes, and enabling personalized, transparent interactions with customers. By addressing these critical areas, a sophisticated OMS empowers organizations to navigate evolving consumer demands while achieving efficiency and competitive advantage.

What is IBM Sterling Order Management and what problems does it solve?

IBM Sterling Order Management delivers a seamless order management experience across all channels, enhances cross-channel efficiencies, and streamlines complex inventory and fulfillment operations across your commerce systems.

This system offers features such as real-time inventory visibility and demand tracking, configurable order orchestration and workflows, reverse logistics for multichannel returns and return order status. By using IBM Sterling OMS, businesses can improve operations, respond to changing market demands, and achieve excellence in delivering consistent customer experiences. Organizations across various industries use OMS solutions, including retail, e-commerce, and manufacturing.

Managing orders and inventory across multiple channels can be challenging. Businesses often face issues such as inconsistent setups, high infrastructure costs, and difficulty keeping systems secure and scalable across platforms. These challenges can increase operational overhead and slow down the time-to-market for critical updates.

IBM Sterling Order Management (OMS) is designed to offer customers complete flexibility in managing installation and deployment, enabling them to tailor the system to their unique business needs and operational environment. With its operator-based deployment model, now it’s easier than ever to install IBM Sterling OMS on any Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift implementation. Notably, it can now also run on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA). This brings together the reliability of Red Hat OpenShift with the scalability and global reach of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Advantages of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Deploying on ROSA offers businesses the best of both worlds: a fully managed Red Hat OpenShift experience and the flexibility of running on AWS. It eliminates much of the hassle of managing infrastructure, improving scalability, consistency, and deployment times. With ROSA, you can focus on what really matters—delivering a seamless order management experience. The Sterling Operator simplifies the deployment and application life cycle, including deploying instances of OMS, and simplifying major version updates. This combination brings together the flexibility of ROSA with the powerful capabilities of Sterling OMS, making it easier to manage IT operations while ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.

The container offering of Sterling Order Management offers portability with support for hybrid and on-premises deployments, and is optimized to run on Red Hat OpenShift. For customers unfamiliar with running containers in production, AWS has partnered with IBM and Red Hat to develop a Sterling Order Management application on ROSA reference architecture (Figure 1).

Architecture overview

Figure 1: High level architecture overview

Once the Sterling Operator is deployed within the OpenShift cluster it can be used to create multiple instances of OMS, beneficial for workload aggregation within OpenShift. This is helpful for multiple OMS tenants or for aggregation of non production instances of OMS. Customers should be aware that all instances of OMS on the same OpenShift cluster will need to be the same version. Currently, it is not possible to deploy different versions of the Sterling operator on the same cluster.

The following diagram (Figure 2) shows a deeper dive into the underlying components of Sterling within OpenShift.

Figure 2: Sterling component view within OpenShift

Streamlining Sterling Order Management with ROSA
Deploying Sterling Order Management on ROSA provides significant operational advantages by reducing IT team workloads. Red Hat and AWS manage all cluster lifecycle operations, including upgrades, patches, and security hotfixes. This managed service approach allows businesses to focus on optimizing Sterling Order Management applications and improving core business functions.

With infrastructure management handled externally, teams can redirect their efforts toward enhancing order processing workflows and customer experiences. This strategic reallocation of resources helps organizations maximize their Sterling Order Management investment while maintaining operational excellence.

The Sterling Operator can be installed from the operator hub or software catalog from within the OpenShift web console. Search for Sterling (Figure 3), click on Create (Figure 4), add the required fields, then click Create (Figure 5).

Figure 3: OpenShift Operator hub, Sterling operator

Figure 4: Sterling Operator Create

Figure 5: Sterling Operator configuration

For step by step deployment details and customizations refer to the latest documentation. The documentation also covers deployment into regulated air gapped or disconnected environments which is beyond the scope of this blog.

Built for scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency
ROSA’s scalability ensures that your Sterling Order Management deployment can adapt to changing demand levels, providing the flexibility needed to handle peak loads efficiently. With built-in high availability and fault tolerance, backed by a 99.95% service level agreement (SLA), businesses can trust that their order management system will perform reliably, even during challenging times.

Moreover, operating within your existing AWS account offers financial benefits. ROSA allows you to draw down against your AWS Enterprise Discount Plan (EDP), providing additional cost savings. This combination of operational efficiency and financial flexibility makes ROSA a smart choice for businesses looking to optimize their order management processes.

Control and flexibility
While ROSA manages the underlying platform, organizations maintain complete control over Sterling Order Management versioning and upgrades. This control enables businesses to schedule software updates according to their operational timelines, minimizing disruptions and aligning with business requirements.

Conclusion
Choosing IBM Sterling Order Management on ROSA isn’t just about deploying an application—it’s about making a strategic decision to streamline operations and focus on growth. By leveraging ROSA, businesses can balance operational efficiency with cost savings, all while maintaining the agility needed to thrive in today’s competitive environment.

Should you wish to explore Sterling on AWS in greater detail reach out to either your IBM or AWS account team.
Sterling OMS is also available as a SaaS option via the AWS Marketplace, which is worth exploring should customers desire someone else to take care of the undifferenciated heavy lifting of both Sterling and OpenShift.