IBM Integration Bus Reviews

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.

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.

We use the solution for supply chain management between ERP systems and warehouse management systems. We use it with multiple external partners.

The solution has improved our organization in the sense that it offers new graphical user interfaces and protocols. The fact that they have been made available has helped out business.

The solution has a variety of valuable features.

The ESB characteristics are great. The transformation, protocol bridging and routing are great.

The list of features on offer are both useful and actionable.

The cost is pretty cheap, compared to what else is available in the market.

The solution has been on the market for ten to 15 years, so it's had a lot of time to develop.

The monolithic architecture is an issue.  Due to the fact that it's a built on monolithic architecture, the solution is not very lightweight. It's not highly productive, so, in that sense, it's not so user friendly.

The solution needs to be a little bit more business-friendly in its API management capability.

The solution needs to improve its security and its proactive notification of security issues.

The expiry of the passwords, certificates, and things like that need to be powered by alerts so that it's more obvious that it's something we need to update (before everything actually expires).

I've been using the solution for ten or more years. It's been over a decade since I originally started using the product. I've been working at this particular company as an enterprise architect for the last three years.

The solution is very stable. It's reliable.

I don't recall experiencing any bugs or glitches recently. It doesn't crash.

The solution is scalable. When we need to expand the solution, we can do so easily.

We have about 5,000 integrations on the product. 

It is an integration platform, so everybody related to supply chain management uses it, and eCommerce as well.

We've dealth with technical support in the past and have been more than satisfied with their level of service. They are knowledgable. They respond quickly. I'd rate it nine out of ten overall.

Although we didn't use another solution per se, we do use MuleSoft. 

MuleSoft is more lightweight. It's not as monolithic. We use MuleSoft and another IBM solution. However, we've been using IBM Integration Bus for such a long time at this point. It's been ten to 15 years or so. We've only used MuleSoft for the last three years. It has high productivity and a good number of integrations and the API exchange capabilities.

We run the solutions in parallel.

MuleSoft is a pretty good solution, however, we've noticed that the pricing over the last few years has gone up and it's become quite costly.

The solution has been on the market for over a decade, so the initial setup is pretty straightforward. They've had time to perfect the process. There's also a lot of people who understand how to install it, as it's a mature product with lots of history. Many people have worked with it.

The pricing is pretty good. We've noticed that it's quite reasonable, whereas, for example, solutions like MuleSoft are rising. Salesforce recently acquired MuleSoft and has grown its market share, however, the pricing is turning people off. IBM is much more reasonable.

We're IBM customers. We don't have a business relationship with IBM.

The solution is deployed on an underlying platform in the traditional MQ.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. I'd rate it higher, however, it's not user friendly. That said, it works really well.

We are using Integration Bus for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) services. We are using it to connect APIs to servers, we are using it as an integration bus for hosting, and we are hosting our web services over it. I am using and testing this from the QA (Quality Assurance) perspective.  

The Integration Bus has provided us with a certain level of security. For instance, before we used this solution, we were directly connecting to databases through a DB link. We were able to stop that practice and make it more secure using Integration Bus. It has also provided us with the capability to reuse developed services. Services we developed can now be used with multiple systems and we are able to remove duplicate applications due to this advantage.  

Surely something that can be improved is session management. Sometimes sessions hang. Practically every day we hear about session congestion and this kind of thing. Troubleshooting the issue has become a long-standing problem. Where the true problem lies is a challenge for our support team.  

The session management issue may be a bigger problem for us because our support team is not so highly trained. Also, sometimes our developers are not able to dig down to locate the actual problem. To resolve the issue when it occurs, we have to at least restart the server. It is not really solving the problem, it just relieves the symptoms. These session management problems are the basic issues we are having, but otherwise, our services have become better after bringing in the Integration Bus.  

One thing I would like to have added to Integration Bus is a plugin — or some other software, — to enable testing the performance of our services from the application hosted on the IBM service. I think that the users of the system should be able to get something like that and somehow do performance testing on their own. Currently, I have used some studio or some plugin to find these results. Another option is using services that are available that I have also tried. If IBM could provide this same type of testing capability in its application, that that would be great. It would enable us to report to our business on the facts about how much we have improved from the earlier architecture.  

We have been using IBM Integration Bus for the last three years.  

It is a stable product especially with the release of version 10. We had problems with version 9. But now, version 10 was really a lot more stable and a lot of things have improved. We are much more satisfied with the product and stability of the performance. It is fairly rare that we are unable to troubleshoot something. But I think that most of the problems that we have, from my point of view, is because we are not better trained on the product as a whole. Maybe training could resolve some of our troubleshooting issues. Everything may not be the fault of the product.   

We had scaled up the product usage, so I know it is scalable. We were only using it with a few systems in the beginning and now we are using it with a whole bank of systems and all of the systems are integrated tools.  

The IBM partner that we are working with here is System Limited. IBM was not directly supporting us during the installation and if we have issues we work with the IBM partner.  

We did previously have another solution called BixTalk which we were using four to five years ago. One major problem with BizTalk was that we had very few people available who were actually trained on it. Secondly, there were some sever issues as well. We had a synchronization problem on top of that. Because it was so long ago I do not remember all the issues. Maybe we did have some other problems also. But we had a problem with the product support as well.  

From an installation point of view and just initially setting up this product, it required a lot of configuration. The configuration is the harder part of the installation. Otherwise, the installation was done in a few days by our team. I do not remember exactly whether we had any major problems in doing that, but it could be there were problems and I just did not hear about them.  

There were a lot of things to configure, but that was taken care of by a different department. Our operations department would be the group that handled this. So I do not have actual first-hand information because I did not participate in the process.  

It is a little hard to suggest a product for someone else without knowing anything about their situation. I would surely recommend it for companies that have lots of applications that they want to integrate. This is mostly what I would recommend it for. If you want a platform that seamlessly integrates your different applications, IBM Integration Bus for you.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate IBM Integration Bus as something like seven to eight. For the time being, I will give it a seven. I am pretty much satisfied with the product, but there are certainly ways I have mentioned in which it could improve.  

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The message queue feature is very valuable.

The product could be improved by including more resources on SQL and improving the simplicity of the resources available. Additionally, the price can be reduced.

We have been using this solution for approximately four years and are currently using the first version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, and there are currently many people using the solution in our organization. We have plans to increase the usage of the feature.

It is quite expensive and can be lowered.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our organization is a bank, so we use IBM Integration Bus for integration with core services and test applications.

IBM Integration Bus facilitates communication between parties and legacy systems. For example, the banking industry has a lot of legacy systems, so IBM Integration allows for communication between the legacy systems and new ones and allows us to develop solutions that can respond to the new ones.

We currently use version 10 of IBM Integration Bus. The most beneficial feature is the integration we have with legacy services. We can do the integration to expose other technology to stop, rest and manipulate the output of many legacy services.

We would like to separate the services into different containers, and we don't have this ability right now on IBM Integration Bus. We are currently doing this as an organization, and IBM is setting up the OpenShift.

The version of the technology and current knowledge is a bit outdated. There is also no DevOps, and the process of deploying that is the downside. Regarding additional features, we would like better integration with external solutions like Apache Kafka.

We have been using this solution for six years.

It is a stable solution. The downside is that sometimes it is easier to use another post, like a language outside of IBM Integration Bus, but overall it's a good solution.

It is not scalable.

We do not communicate much with IBM, only for initial setup and completing bootstrapping technology. However, we have IBM partners that work with us. I rate the technical support a four out of ten because they are sometimes a bit selective with the partners they pay attention to.

Our company has been using IBM technology from the beginning.

The initial setup is difficult to configure and set up the first time. I rate the setup a four out of ten.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

IBM Integration Bus is mainly used to integrate banking systems.

IBM Integration Bus' most valuable features are its performance, fast and easy development, and easy support.

Some of the runtime properties need to be improved because if you want to load certificates as sales security, you have to restart the server. There are also some bugs with file transfer protocol.

I've been using IBM Integration Bus for three to four years.

IBM Integration Bus is very stable.

The initial setup was straightforward, and IBM has a great knowledge base to help. I would rate the setup experience as four out of five.

IBM Integration Bus is expensive.

I would give IBM Integration Bus a rating of nine out of ten.

My primary use case of IBM Integration Bus is for designing and developing solutions. We use App Connect Enterprise as a micro ESB and, in cases where we need rapid development, as a microservices platform as well. I'm currently dealing with an on-premises version, but it's deployed on an internal cloud. 

One of the most valuable features is how seamless and easy to use this solution is. This is a fantastic solution and a very measured product. 

There are a couple of things I want improved, but I think they have already touched upon all those things in the most recent version. I'm not using the most recent version—I use a version older than the most recent—but I'm sure that if I looked into and explored it, I would see more support on the CI/CD and more support for unit testing automation. I've read that they released all these things in the new version of App Connect. Once I explore the new version of this tool, I'll probably have a better idea of suggested improvements. 

I have been working in IBM for almost 17 years now. 

This solution is stable. It's a fantastic solution and a very measured product. We only need one person to maintain the DevOps pipeline, but we do have a team of 10 developers to deliver the work.

IBM's technical support is fantastic. Their support process is very good. 

This solution is cloud-based. We are using it in a container image, so the one time CI/CD setup is there, in the pipeline setup, and after that the process is very seamless. We just check in our code, and then the pipeline creates an image of it and deploys it onto our private cloud platform. So it's very seamless and there's no hassle involved. 

Initially, we needed about three people for deployment: one for administrative activities, one with DevOps knowledge, and one developer. 

We implemented through an in-house team. I work as an architect, but we have a DevOps team that takes care of maintaining the pipelines and as-needed administration activities. 

I generally do not get involved in the licensing or pricing because I'm a hardcore technical guy, but I'm aware of the fact that IBM is highly expensive, so not everybody can afford it. All the products are licensed. 

I have heard of MuleSoft, a platform that provides a solution for API management, ESB, everything. When it comes to ESB, they have a package or facility feature for unit testing as well, called MUnit or something. From an ESB development point of view, this is the complete package. I was lacking these features in App Connect, but I heard that the latest version includes things like unit testing, automation features, all those things. I also heard that they added AI—I'm not sure where, but IBM is pretty big on that, as well as on adding more and more features in that area. 

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. This is a very measured tool and IBM has been doing a splendid job with this particular platform. Earlier, it was only possible to have an on-premises installation, but now that it's compatible with the cloud, it's a very seamless and fantastic tool. Especially with the current release, I really like this product. 

In terms of advice I would give to those considering implementation, I would say that there could be a problem with integration. Nothing to do with the tools, but from a resourcing point of view. I've seen that a lot of people with Java expertise can face problems when being introduced to this technology without proper training. When a Java developer gets into this particular technology and starts developing stuff, they may be unaware of certain best practices, certain standards, certain conventions that should be used. In my team, when we hire new resources, Java is an advantage for us and a person with Java knowledge is highly welcome, but when we look at their knowledge in the technology itself, there may be issues. This platform is complex and only a person with the right knowledge will be able to deliver. So my suggestion to those who are considering implementation: while resourcing, ensure that you've got the right knowledge on the architect side as well as the developer side.