Bahrain Central Informatics Organisation drives for e-Government on IBM and open standards platform

The move is key to Bahrain's advanced national e-government initiative and comes as part of a wide-ranging agreement reached between CIO, Gulf Business Machines (GBM) and IBM to supply software, hardware and services to support the transformation of citizen services in the country.

'Standards based technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for modernisation throughout society in our country. The pioneering vision of the Government of Bahrain is dedicated to ensuring that the Kindgom is at the forefront of developing technology and in driving services for our citizens with flexibility and accessibility to government services,' said Shaikh Ahmed Ateyatalla Al Khalifa, Undersecretary of the CIO.

Gulf Business Machines, the sole distributor for IBM products and services in the Gulf countries for selected products outside Saudi Arabia, has been working with the CIO to drive the delivery of web-enabled applications that unify the government's information infrastructure and provide powerful services to citizens using secure hardware, network, Internet and software platforms. The project integrates Bahrain's back-end systems, such as National Database, Immigration and Central Population Registration (CPR) systems, Decision Support systems and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will support the introduction of a national smart card system that will give citizens access to information, services and government facilities.

'In making this agreement with IBM, the Bahrain Government joins a growing number of governments around the world are benefiting from the reduced cost and increased flexibility. The decision to build a national e-government strategy on open standards clearly demonstrates the fundamental role of Linux can play in a government's economic strategy, 'said Tom Francese, Vice President Software Group EMEA.

The Bahrain e-government strategy is made up of five key projects: a national Dataset Project, a Security Strategy Implementation Project, a Hardware and Software Upgrade Project and a Government Data Network project as well as an Applications Transformation Project. Alongside these, a national Smart Card and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) project will result in a single card for citizens and expatriates which will give access to government services and support an 'e-purse' payment mechanism.

The National Database Project will see the migration of Bahrain's legacy national dataset to a unified dataset based on IBM's DB2 database platform, allowing intra-governmental access to information.l The Security Strategy Implementation Project will ensure that governmental information, as well as citizen's personal privacy, is protected based on IBM's advanced, mainframe-based 'security server' system. The Applications Transformation Project ensures all governmental applications are portable and will work on a single integrated application approach across Linux servers. The hardware and software upgrade project ties together the physical requirements at the central mainframe, server and client terminal levels required to implement the whole strategy. In addition, the Government Data Network project will hone and unify the established GDN, implemented in 1995, and bring it into line with the requirements of the e-Government strategy.

'This is a solid strategy which CIO has developed in order to build secure, stable and flexible e-Government services in Bahrain. We have worked extensively with the teams at GBM and IBM to bring together a workable solution that has been through proof of concept testing,' said said Shaikh Ahmed Ateyatalla Al Khalifa, Undersecretary of the CIO. 'The solution is based on open standards: security in the conventional sense that we believe the integrity of our information will be protected but also security in the sense that an open platform preserves our right to choice.'

One of the most important elements to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution is the creation of a 'proof of concept' test bed by GBM, which includes a pilot application development based on web-enabling the Central Population Registration system, a security proof of concept based on IBM Tivoli Access Manager, and a mini-National Data Set based on DB2 software. WebSphere MQ Series forms the integration engine for production services.

The IBM offering provides a single-window solution in line with the strategy for a common framework and GBM / IBM was the only vendor able to provide a complete end-to-end solution. 'The foundation for the infrastructure includes Linux platforms within IBM eServer zSeries servers as a backend platform; IBM WebSphere as the middleware, application server, e-business and infrastructure software; IBM MQSI as an Integration engine; IBM Tivoli as an enterprise management environment; and IBM's DB2 as the database platform. IBM WebSphere on the IBM eServer pSeries 640 will be used as a testing and development environment, The decision to build a national e-government strategy on the open standard Linux platform gives confidence in the long-term stability and ongoing versatility of choice that the customer can enjoy and this is vitally important for a government choosing to move an entire national resource to a technology base' added Cesare Cardone, Chief Executive Officer, GBM.

The IBM eServer zSeries 800 is built on proven technology and is designed for 24/7 operation. Its features - such as dynamic resource allocation based on business objectives, bullet proof security and its dynamic scalability to handle unpredictable enterprise e-business workloads - will create an intelligent, self-managing IT infrastructure.

It will process business critical applications and is able to manage the requirements of large numbers of users who need to access multiple applications and data sources typical of e-Government environments. This same infrastructure will be duplicated at the customer's hot disaster recovery site providing zero data loss backup. The backup site will also be CIO's testing and development environment for WebSphere and DB2.

The operating system for the IBM eServer zSeries will uniquely allow CIO to specifically determine and maintain the level of service provided to its users by application. This is crucial for e-Government since its users, many of whom are external, will form an impression of the Kingdom based on the experiences they have in accessing Bahrain Government services through the Internet.

Entire legacy applications will be transferred to the IBM AD toolset. Visualage for Java, WebSphere Studio Application Developer and the e-government platform will be hosted using IBM's WebSphere Application server and MQ series for transaction processing. Tivoli will be used to manage the infrastructure using Tivoli Netview and Tivoli Storage Manager for the GDN and security requirements.

These Linux, WebSphere and MQ Series technologies will enable CIO to achieve its vision for open standards deployment and newly developed Linux applications will be consolidated over time on the IBM eServer zSeries 800 consisting of WebSphere on Linux and DB2 on Linux, providing better systems management, security, performance and reducing complexity.