How Smals helps the Belgian government innovate with APIs

Smals provides an API-centric platform to modernize the Belgium government’s data architecture and leverage new technologies and security protocols, while offering greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Smals: serving Belgian public agencies

Smals is a Belgian organization that specializes in delivering IT solutions for the government, social and healthcare organizations, as well as public services that need IT services. The main objective is to work actively and in a manner that is sustainable for the future.

The organization’s purpose is to play a key role as an ICT assimilator between the various public social security institutions. By offering high-performance IT solutions at a reduced cost, Smals seeks to have its services and know-how capabilities readily available to its clients.

“Smals is a participant for an initiative for creating a private cloud that is specifically for the Belgium government and we host a service like an API gateway for services,” explains Willem Salembier, Solutions Architect Integration Platforms at Smals.

Smals has a long history of exchanging data through services. They began their journey in the late 90s with communications solely-based on web services and then proceeded to services-oriented architecture (SOA).

Read more about API gateways in the modern enterprise.

Modernizing with Amplify Platform

Smals needed a new direction for modernizing their legacy systems, so they sought out help for this endeavor. Beyond moving to support RESTful services, today’s generally accepted API standard, Smals also needed to ensure security standards like OAuth or GWT.

During vendor selection, Smals conducted stress tests and found Amplify Platform was one of the most performant vendors. Smals teamed up with Axway to bring a modern approach to Smals’ legacy challenges.

“We decided to go with Axway because we thought that it was a very flexible tool,” says Salembier. “Because we have this history to support, we can’t expect that if we migrate to a new platform that it does the same things like the old platform.”

It was essential to grow to a new platform without impacting all the existing consumers and providers of services, since Smals already maintained a large catalog integrated into many applications.

With Amplify Platform, Axway provided a new platform that is not only flexible enough to meet Smals’ objectives but could also expose the same functionality and interfaces, all while modernizing how it’s implemented internally. Axway’s solution met Smals’ challenges with a sound migration for their legacy systems.

Scaling for the future

Smals was able to migrate its APIs in a controlled manner to ensure continued efficiency. With Axway, Smals is provided with a highly available platform.

Smals has numerous integrations for software for medicines, as well as pharmacists that must run 24/7, and the group manages a large volume of data transactions. Its health platform sees some 1.2 billion transactions per month, with peak loads going up to 2-3 thousand requests per second.

“You really need a rock-solid solution that can cope with those kinds of health demands and volumes,” concludes Salembier.

Amplify meets these challenges with a robust platform set up in a high-availability architecture across multiple data centers, allowing Smals to continue to scale even further.

Learn more about the types of services supported by Smals’ new platform in the video below:

Amplify brings a cost-efficient solution for Smals’ necessary requirements to stay competitive in a digital world. The new API-centric platform helps provide new skills and security protocols that Smals simply didn’t have before, and they’re finding it easier and faster to deploy new APIs as they innovate.