Case Study: Carey International achieves zero-downtime modernization with IBM Instana and IBM WebSphere Liberty

A modernization journey with zero downtime

Carey International, Inc., a premium ground transportation provider operating in 400 cities worldwide, needed to modernize its legacy reservation, billing, customer service, and event management systems. The company was facing increasing pressure from security requirements, high-availability demands, rising costs, and the specialized skills needed to maintain aging platforms such as IBM WebSphere Application Server, Red Hat JBoss, and Oracle databases.

Using IBM Instana and IBM WebSphere Liberty, Carey International moved its Java applications to Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, with databases shifted to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and APIs managed in a modernized architecture. IBM Instana provided real-time observability to identify performance bottlenecks and operational issues, helping support load testing, go-live, and production monitoring. The migration was completed in a six-hour outage window, and Carey reports nearly zero downtime since then, with performance and reliability meeting or exceeding its on-premises system while releases became faster and non-disruptive.

Carey International