IBM Integration Bus Reviews

We are a software development company and we use IBM Integration Bus for integrating different internal systems for the customer side and to integrate the internal systems with external systems for different kinds of flows.

There are three elements that make IBM Integration Bus very important for our organization's payroll systems which are the solution's high scalability, performance, and reliability.

The current version of IBM Integration Bus, now called App Connect Enterprise, provides operators for deployment in the OpenShift cluster, which makes deployment much easier and significantly increases the scalability and reliability of the integration solutions.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for approximately two years.

IBM Integration Bus is very reliable and stable. If the right configuration is done, in operation everything is runs very well. If you have not configured everything well then you most likely will have some stability or performance issues.

IBM Integration Bus is scalable. If you are using OpenShift then the solution's scalability becomes even better.

We have approximately 12 people who have the experience to use this solution.

I would rate the support from IBM Integration Bus a seven out of ten. They are very helpful but sometimes it takes too long for them to respond.

The implementation of the solution at the beginning phase can be complicated. The time it takes for the implementation depends on the environment a lot of other factors.

The development toolkit that is provided is very good. It helps to configure all the message flows and data transformation. They also provide Extended SQL language (ESQL) for different types of data transformation.

The solution does not require much maintenance.

IBM provides a quite complicated licensing model.

We have evaluated other solutions and we have found that IBM solutions to be highly stable and scalable.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

In general, we are using IBM Integration Bus for integration purposes only because we have multiple applications to integrate.

I have found IBM Integration Bus is very useful because it can integrate multiple backend applications.

The solution could improve by having built-in implementation and secure monitoring without the need for API Connect.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for approximately six years.

We have not had any issue with the stability of the solution. However, there are times when we have policies in place and after the installation, the data wizard does not work.

The technical from IBM has been very good.

The installation was straightforward.

IBM Integration Bus itself is prices fair but App-Connect is a bit expensive which we use in conjunction with it.

I have evaluated MuleSoft.

I would recommend this solution to developers.

I rate IBM Integration Bus a seven out of ten.

The IBM Integration Bus is a very strong, very easy-to-use product. 

We prefer it due to the fact that we can get support from IBM when we need to, as opposed to using open-source tools that do not have support.

Sometimes companies have systems from IBM, Oracle, HP, et cetera. IIB is a good candidate to enable all heterogeneous systems to exchange data smoothly without any effort.

The product is a user-customized tool so that you can adjust it to your specific needs pretty well with little trouble. 

The initial setup is easy.

While it is very user-friendly there is another open-source tool in the market you can use instead of it.

The integration could be better, especially when it comes to integrating with older systems or solutions. 

The solution needs to simplify its documentation, such as the user and operation manuals, to make them even easier to understand. 

I've been working with IBM products for 30 years or so. This particular IBM solution, however, I've dealt with for the last four years. That said, I have a lot of IBM experience. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product is upgradable. There is the potential to scale. 

In the Middle East, the customers are looking for a company that can take over anything and handles everything if there are issues. The support is very reliable and helpful. They are responsive and knowledgeable and we are very happy with their capabilities. 

I'm also familiar with Apache Kafka. Kafka is much faster. The performance is much greater than IIB. IIB is not as fast as Kafka.

For myself, the initial setup was very easy due to the fact that I have worked with IBM for many years and I'm quite comfortable with the brand.

That said, the IBM environment is fairly complicated. It is much easier than other options, even so, and technical support is quite helpful if users run into issues. 

I am not a partner for IBM. That said, IBM has used me for consultation issues and training sources. I used to be a partner, maybe six years ago.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

It is used to enable communication between applications. For example, when application A needs to interact with application B, IBM Integration Bus provides a kind of bridge that helps application A to communicate with application B in terms of messaging. Application A might be using a specific format, such as XML, which needs to be converted into the format understood by application B. IBM Integration Bus takes care of this transformation and routing of messages from application A to application B. I have seen IIB been used in the banking, payments, and finance domains.

It makes the communication between multiple and heterogeneous applications so easy. We can bring together different messages and applications from different platforms and connect them through IBM Integration Bus.

They need to come up with Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). It should also have a feature for integrating with those applications that are on the cloud.

I have been using this solution for the past four years.

It is stable. There are plenty of projects that have been using this tool. My friends or my ex-colleagues who have moved to other organizations also find it good.

I don't have an insight into the scalability as such, but based on the meetings related to the maintenance of the application, I did not come across any scalability-related issues.

There were a couple of instances when my team approached them, and there was a good response from the IBM team. There were some delays, but that happened almost three to four years ago. Their support might have improved recently.

It is quite straightforward. For our project, we do have different needs. We build artifacts that are ready to be deployed. These artifacts need to be placed in a specific folder or directory. They are then picked up and deployed in the servers. It is quite automated these days.

Its deployment is quick. It is a matter of seconds.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

We are using the solution as an outer layer for all of our API calls we are making outside of our own devices. All APIs integrations are routing through the ESB only. We are using it for IIB server components and the DataPower, which is an API gateway. It is providing us with a security layer because all the outside calls do not have direct communication with our own server, this middle layer is called the ESB. 

The solution has helped my organization because any new integration coming to my backend system, we can easily implement it in a shorter time. This is because the middle layer takes care of all API language conversions or the code conversion, and also does the maintaining of the logs.

Having the solution come from IBM you know you are receiving a product of quality in components and in the services, it is very good.

I do not think there are any improvement areas because it depends on what exactly the use case for this ESB is. Some organizations are having a lot of integration and they will choose a regular ESB. While others will choose the security purpose route, making an extra layer. It depends from organization to organization, to determine how this solution can be improved from their specific use cases. Otherwise, I think that there are not any relevant improvement areas to give.

I used the solution in my last company for a long while.

The solution came to the market a long while ago, it has had time to mature. It is really stable and large organizations can rely on it. Smaller companies could too but it is too expensive.

It is a scalable solution. You can have any number of integration, it depends on the server and how much space you are providing to the IIB servers. We plan to have more than 50 wired integration by the end of the year.

The installation is not easy. You need experts who know how to install this IIB. The common technician will not have the knowledge to do it. You will need assistance installing the solution even though on IBM's website you can download the complete user manual explaining how to install the IIB servers. 

We used a third-party vendor, who help us install the solution and it was not easy. If you have most things in place at the site the whole installation process can take approximately three days. 

To do the complete deployment you will need at least one architecture that understands this IIB solution. It all depends on what kind of IP division architecture you have. Based on the project's scope, you then can define your team. There is no certain number of how many team members is required. It depends on your project, how large it is, and based on that you can decide how much manpower is required.

The solution requires a license and is very expensive here in India. Large organizations will be able to afford it but smaller companies will have a difficult time paying for the solution at the current price.

I am going to continue to use this solution, when you purchase this solution you have spent a lot of money, you have to continue to use it to make a return on investment.

I would recommend this solution if they have a large budget.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

I'm responsible for Strategy and Architecture for an IT consulting company they are partners with IBM. 

I like that this solution is suitable for any size company. It's simple to use from a development perspective because the content is easily infiltrated in the eclipse infrastructure. It's also credible in all the application aspects and easy to integrate into the enterprise application landscape. Finally, there is also a good relationship with IBM itself that assists us in implementing. You can really use this architecture but you have to understand the technology itself. It means you can do everything with this technology on condition that implementation is carried out correctly but this is a general term and valid for all solutions on the market. IBM is offering with the Integration Bus a very robust and stable solution.

The solution itself is quite expensive for smaller companies because of a complex architecture setup if you just start. Easier and a more plug and playable solution which make an MVP easier in being able to show the value faster to the customer.

I've been using this solution for about 10 years in different projects and for different customers.

This is a very stable solution.

Scalability depends on the money that you have in your pockets. Technologically speaking, it's a scalable solution. 

I get good support from the IBM technical people. It also depends on your philosophy, how you implement this. I have a lot of very experienced people, but also a good relationship with the laboratories, which is also sometimes necessary when you're doing something new and a highly sophisticated implementation is required. You need to have a support team for the product development. 

The initial setup is straightforward, it's a simple solution. 

Evaluate and define a clear architecture, and set up a governance framework that includes a competence center that will take care of the usage, the licenses which will be needed, and do guarantee the reuse of interfaces and components.

I always suggest carrying out a proof of concept each time. People who are able to set this up and also monitor it, will discover how easy it is to customize and to integrate the architecture. The POC creates familiarity and also an understanding of the skill set required. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are trying to use IBM Integration Bus in our organization. We have multiple things to do. Like DataStage, we also have SAP BODS as another ETL. We are also using JAM Server and Java. 

Instead of separately writing the Java code and restful web service and then using the ETL and JAM Server to call on a file basis, I am thinking of using IBM Integration Bus. I have a message flow. Once I drop a file, IBM Integration Bus will pick up all the functions, do everything on the MQ Server, and finally fit it with the web service, which is also created in IBM Integration Bus. I would have the complete message flow in one architecture site. I can apply it by using ETL, Java, and the JAM Server. However, it is failing at the data mining stage itself. It could be because of my lack of knowledge of IBM Integration Bus.

I use the integration of Kafka and the message flow, which is really good. It is also good for moving any file from one location to another. 

Using IBM Integration Bus in the data stage is pretty simple. You can see the preview and other things.

The MQ server integrated with IBM Integration Bus is really great. I don't have to do a lot of configuration from that side. It is really good.

It needs improvement in terms of technical support as well as in terms of integration of data mining. I am not convinced about many things in this solution, such as the conversion of the DFDL or copybook file, which is the conversion from a text file to XML. It is very complex.

They should also provide more information about this solution in the IBM Knowledge Center. I can get a lot of information from the IBM Knowledge Center about DataStage, but I don't get that much information about IBM Integration Bus. There is hardly any information even on the internet and various channels such as YouTube. They can provide good step-by-step documentation based on a company's requirements. It would be really helpful.

My company is mainly looking for data mining and communicating with multiple servers. IBM Integration Bus is good for communicating with multiple servers, but it needs improvement for XML conversion and data mining. We have a lot of old systems that use XML.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for two to four months.

I contacted technical support, but I wasn't able to get the correct answer. I feel I wasn't given a good response. I was communicating with a person from technical support, and he took two to three months to help me with the support. Finally, he delegated that ticket to some other person, and he resolved my issue in one week, but the solution was not convincing. 

I wanted to know how DataStage does one-to-many and many-to-one mapping because it was failing in IBM Integration Bus. I have a DFPL file, and I have an XML Schema. I want to map the added element from the DFPL file to the XML Schema. The technical support person was saying that you have to write the ESQL code for mapping, but I don't know how many elements are there. Suppose I have 100 elements for one area at present, but next time, I might have 90 elements. He was saying that you should know somehow where IBM Integration Bus is failing, but there was no way to find that out. The mapping for that element was not there in the dynamic run-time query.

The initial setup is complex. It is not user friendly. When you have a file in the MQ Server, it moves to the next directory, which is the output. It is very complex to call a web service. It should just give the setup of the endpoint and do some basic stuff so that it can be consumed by the web service. It might be complex because of my less experience in using IBM Integration Bus.

I would recommend this solution if you are not doing any XML conversion or data mining and just want to use a message flow, such as reading a file and transporting to another location and then calling some message and integrating it with an existing system such as Salesforce.

If you have a lot of integration, I would recommend hiring some experienced people for it. IBM Integration Bus is a very big product, and people don't know even 20% of this product. If people have good knowledge of it, they can really do a lot of stuff. Based on my understanding, its complexity is the reason why people don't have good expertise in this product. I am an experienced Java professional, but I am facing a lot of difficulties in understanding IBM Integration Bus.

I would rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten. It needs improvement for data mining, DFDL, and schema converter. There should also be more documentation and information in the IBM Knowledge Center.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. Usually, they want to use this for consolidating the services. It is used to integrate their core insurance systems with the rest of the environment.

We try to enable this kind of service-oriented architecture (SOA) to assist our clients with consolidating all of their services.

The most valuable feature is the API integration.

The integration is difficult to manage.

Migrating to this solution is complex and it would be helpful if they had a way to convert existing integrations.

We have been using IBM Integration Bus for more than three years.

From a scalability point of view, I think that this product is good.

I would say that it is good for an enterprise-level customer.

We receive our technical support through an IBM partner in Taiwan. However, developing this kind of project required asking for assistance from the IBM Lab Services. Without Lab Services, our support would not have been as strong.

Migrating to this solution is complicated and not simple to do if they already have API integration between systems.

We also work with TIBCO and Oracle ESB solutions. We find that our customers have had a good experience with them and there is always a lot of interest in these two products.

IBM Integration Bus is a good product and I would recommend it for enterprise customers.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.