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.

The recent Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™ 2024 in Barcelona gave us a wonderful opportunity to invite Smals’ Willem Salembier to share how they are leveraging our Amplify Platform to achieve these goals. Here’s a look at how the organization enables powerful eGovernment services.

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.

“Because our catalog of services is growing, and the number of clients is growing fast with a significant cost in hosting and protecting these APIs that exist, the main goal is to go for a cost reduction for a more efficient platform to host the APIs.”

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

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.

Three API use cases in the Belgian government

Here are three concrete examples of ways that Smals helps enable modern eGovernment services in Belgium.

Real-time updates for social inspection services

Inspectors visiting construction sites can get a clear overview of everyone present on site thanks to an application that collects information from various institutions. This enables them to check whether workers are legally employed, whether they have a work permit if they are foreign, and whether they are not unemployed or out sick.

All this information is gathered from many sources, and immediately visible by the inspectors on their mobile phone.

Innovative and secure communication channels for citizens & enterprises

Smals has developed eBox, their own secure mailbox that offers a reliable alternative to paper communications. eBox is used by millions of citizens and companies and offers legal proof equivalent to registered mail sent by post.

The MyGov application enables citizens to access information on their status, obtain documents such as a birth certificate or driver’s license, and request a certificate of family composition. The application, available 24/7, is secure and authenticated in accordance with the European eIDAS standard.

eHealth government platform

Smals offers numerous integrations for software in the medical and pharmaceutical industry, which must run 24/7, and the group manages a large volume of data transactions.

The eHealth platform, for example, is a digital exchange platform that connects all partners in the Belgian healthcare sector, including general practitioners, hospitals, medical laboratories and pharmacists. This critical platform, which handles around 20 billion transactions a year, enables the secure exchange of sensitive medical data, such as prescriptions, medical images and hospital discharge reports.

Importantly, patients retail control over their medical data: eHealth does not centralize all the medical data of Belgian citizens. Instead, data is spread across different systems and medical safes, and patients always have control over the sharing of their information.

eHealth provides API services to make this communication happen, and Smals provides credentials for the parties, recognizing each one’s role.

Patients can give their explicit consent to share information between healthcare providers and revoke this access if necessary.

Scaling for the future

Smals’ eGovernment approach relies on standards, rigorous governance, and Axway’s Amplify API management platform to ensure system performance, security and scalability.

Smals also emphasizes the importance of reusing software and APIs to optimize costs and accelerate digital transformation. 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.