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\"it_user801987<\/a>
it_user801987<\/a>Software Trainee at Miracle Software Systems, Inc at a tech services company<\/span><\/div>
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well explained.Thank you<\/p><\/div>

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\"it_user579336<\/a>
it_user579336<\/a>Principal Information System Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees<\/span><\/div>
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Hi Andrew,<\/p>\n\n

Here are some of my thoughts which might help you ;<\/p>\n\n

The real value of IBM API connect lies for enterprises in Healthcare, Financial and Insurance industry because they have to deliver and comply with strict security and privacy norms. The most important architecture/product evaluation decision about deployment of any API management solution would focus around security. As in long run, any enterprise would like to monetize the solution by exposing API, even if they don\'t have external API requirement now. \n
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The true value of any API management solution lies in API gateway which is the runtime engine for API management solution. Datapower gateway is built on hardened and secured javascript engine while Mulesoft is an application that runs on JVM. Mulesoft based solution is vulnerable to all security threats posed to a typical Java application as well as JDK vulnerabilities fixed by Oracle time to time. With IBM API connect you also get Virtual Machine and docker form factor which can be installed on VMWARE and Linux.<\/p>\n\n

Recently IBM launched a preview version of API connect on docker. The preview version doesn\'t have command-line interface access yet but IBM is working on releasing a full featured IBM API connect solution too. The newer APIConnect release 5.0.7.2 is easier to use and has multi language support which is useful for any global organization. IBM has taken big step to accept and support OpenAPI specification (i.e. Swagger ) for their API platform starting from IBM API connect. Older IBM API management (firmware 4 and earlier) solution was not based on OpenAPI instead was using YAML for API definition , same which Mulesoft platform uses inherently. <\/p>\n\n

I have also worked on Apigee edge which is a cloud based platform and I found it easier and convenient to use.Currently Apigee offers more out of the box policies than IBM API Connect. I feel IBM on-premise solution require quite a learning curve in start. Unfortunately I had to learn IBM API management (firmware 4 and earlier) which was older version. Then IBM made significant change in IBM API Connect (firmware v 5 +). Also IBM API connect inherently support XML-JSON or JSON-XML policies as Datapower supports both JSON and XML parsers while Mulesoft internally use Custom extension functions and Java objects to do this conversion. So you get highly secure, efficient and customized parsor for XML and JSON processing with API Connect which can be deployed in DMZ network zone.<\/p>\n\n

Also as per my understanding, Datapower use non-blocking/parallel processing to process a single transaction while Java based application/Mulesoft use a thread which might be a problem, when it comes to high scalability. So for long term approach to API management solution, APIConnect/Datapower will be highly scalable and faster than Mulesoft .<\/p>\n\n

There are also some github projects to create custom policies for API connect which can be imported in API Connect. I clearly see API Connect is better solution than Mulesoft but I am still in middle of evaluating it against Apigee out of my own interest , so I will leave that comparison for future.<\/p>\n\n

Regards,\n
Mayank<\/p><\/div>