TIBCO BusinessWorks Reviews

We have TIBCO BusinessWorks installed, and we also had an old iProcess installation. I am a consultant for TIBCO BusinessWorks.

A lot of adapters in TIBCO BusinessWorks are very valuable, and we have a lot of developers available in the market, which makes it easy. TIBCO BusinessWorks' real-time data exchange capability has benefited our customers greatly; we conduct a lot of messaging with Superstream and external partners, so it works well for us.

The user interface of TIBCO BusinessWorks is adequate and accomplishes its purpose. We have most of the connectors we need for TIBCO BusinessWorks; ERPs are a bit of a challenge, but otherwise they are acceptable.

I assess TIBCO BusinessWorks' monitoring and management capabilities as reasonably good.

The challenges I have faced with TIBCO BusinessWorks mostly relate to financial applications that do not come with those adapters, so that requires custom coding.

The features currently in TIBCO BusinessWorks are good enough, but going forward, as we are doing a lot of AI-based integrations, I would like to see TIBCO come up with more prompt-driven configurations rather than people having to understand deep technology. AI-driven features in TIBCO BusinessWorks would be beneficial, so that our business tech BA can do the development rather than needing programmers. More artificial intelligence functionality would help so people do not have to code.

We have had TIBCO for almost 25 years.

TIBCO BusinessWorks is quite stable and scales very well, so we are happy. We have not changed and have no plan to change.

I rate TIBCO technical support as fantastic on a scale of one to ten. I give TIBCO a nine out of ten for technical support; they are just across the road from us and we know most of them anyway.

Positive

Because we have enterprise licenses, the pricing for TIBCO BusinessWorks is quite reasonable for us, so we do not see any issue.

I rate TIBCO BusinessWorks an eight; it exceeds expectations. We do have other solutions such as BizWork and other things, but we also had Oracle Fusion, so it is not that we have not tried others. But for our shop, TIBCO makes sense.

I am not looking for a new solution anymore. We are using TIBCO products, specifically TIBCO, but that is about it for integration. You can ask a few short questions about TIBCO BusinessWorks. We do not use many microservices in TIBCO BusinessWorks, but they do have support. I am not across it because we have not deployed any. I rate this review an eight overall.

The typical use case for TIBCO BusinessWorks functions as middleware. When you have multiple systems connected, you want to avoid point-to-point connectivity. In place of point-to-point connectivity, you have middleware which exposes all your API services to the external world. You are developing all the orchestration rules.

If more than one API needs to be aggregated together, the response needs to be sent in a consolidated manner, then all these logics are being built.

The best features of TIBCO BusinessWorks compared to other products are that it is a roadmap product. The company has proper support. We have similar products in the market, including open source options, but they don't have any support beyond community feedback. TIBCO BusinessWorks is a standard product widely used by many companies. It is more stable, has future releases, and is compliant with new technologies.

The significant advantage is that it is a standardized product with a proper, well-planned roadmap, support, and R&D.

The positive impact I have experienced from installing TIBCO BusinessWorks is that it is reliable and has better support. It is easy to use and saves overall support costs.

The real-time data exchange capability of TIBCO BusinessWorks has helped mission-critical systems because the uptime is superb. We have implemented it in a Kubernetes cluster with auto-scaling. If any systems go down, we have pods that automatically restart and spawn new pods which start taking the load. Earlier deployments used to be on VMs where infrastructure was limited, making scaling difficult. With Kubernetes, you can provision in advance and scale up or down based on requirements.

The graphical user interface of TIBCO BusinessWorks is very easy to use. You can configure all components efficiently. Previously, configuration required opening XML files, which wasn't easy to understand without complete specifications knowledge. The graphical interface makes it easy to understand what needs to be configured and is straightforward to use.

There could be improvement areas in TIBCO BusinessWorks because every area needs to improve as the industry is demanding and traffic is increasing. Performance and latency could be enhanced. Additionally, having signaling stack support would be beneficial.

We have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks for three to four years.

The deployment process for TIBCO BusinessWorks is straightforward. We have a pipeline, DevSecOps, where you can put the configuration and proceed directly. It is easy to deploy and not complex.

The time spent on deployment depends on the type of change request being taken to production. For big releases, it takes more time, but for small weekly change requests, it takes roughly 30 minutes to one hour.

Deployments can be done independently by our implementation team. We have a DR setup, so customer services won't be impacted. The DR site is typically a standby site, not active-active traffic. However, in some scenarios, particularly for signaling core parts, they are active-active, with both sides carrying traffic, especially for call handling.

The technical support from TIBCO BusinessWorks is very good. I would rate it 8.5 to 9 out of 10.

Positive

I cannot provide metrics on cost savings because I have not done the comparative analysis personally. There are many software options available in the market, including Fuse, Mule, TIBCO, and other competitors. TIBCO BusinessWorks is a leader in this space, and when purchasing the best product, you need to rely on the fact that services will not be impacted and support will be received on time.

The current licensing cost for the product involves our resource sourcing team for negotiations. It depends on the type of licenses being used, whether perpetual or not. Sourcing manages these aspects while we only provide recommendations.

We assess the impact of TIBCO BusinessWorks' monitoring and management capabilities using tools such as Grafana and AppDynamics. We monitor the endpoints and traffic that we have exposed from BusinessWorks.

We use TIBCO's support for microservices architecture as all our services are exposed as microservices. Each service is deployed as individual pods, and we are heavily using GraphQL-based microservices.

I would rate TIBCO BusinessWorks a 9 out of 10.

I receive the requirements, and I build my services on typical BusinessWorks.

It is drag and drop. Drag and drop make it easier to build the service end to end. It is easier to build services with BusinessWorks. When I have an architecture designed to plug in the service itself with BW, it makes things much easier. It is easy to integrate, especially when the architecture is well-designed.

The creation of XSDs should be much simpler. They should ensure that what was working in the previous version must also work in the new version of BW six.

I have used the solution for three years.

I will give it an eight. It is stable, however, every now and then, it just ends. I have to end the process from Windows Task Manager.

I do not know if it is scalable, but the tool I use to build services, if there are issues, cannot grow or decline as it should. I just build and add services. BWX is not really a tool I can describe as scalable or not. It is not like AWS where I can add memory or more servers. 

With BWWorks, it is difficult since it is not a tool I can describe as scalable. As a development tool, I can add or remove features as I want. I cannot rate its scalability because I cannot scale BWX.

Customer service is very helpful. I have logged a couple of requests and support was unresponsive, although I have received assistance from support as well in the past. Some of the tasks need people who understand the customer more. 

They often refer to their documentation, which they could simply give me so I can do it myself.

Neutral

I just download the installation executable and then run it. There is nothing complex about it.

I implemented it all by myself.

I cannot really say I have seen it because I am just a developer within the large company. I do not see the financial benefits from the company that I work for.

Pricing is for an enterprise application, so the company pays for it with a company license. Everything comes packaged with the license.

Overall, I will give it an eight out of ten. 

There is still room for improvement as well.

I use TIBCO BusinessWorks for my daily operation work.

It's a great software application for the middleware use cases to connect the front channels to the back ends in a secure and safer way. It is very valuable for my work, helping me communicate with other branches, parse data, and change data formats to respond to the front channels with the correct format.

I would like to see an AI project with BusinessWorks. I haven't worked with cloud architecture using BusinessWorks, so I would like to work with it as a cloud architect. I am still learning the documentation, so I don't have a complete experience with TIBCO. The learning curve takes time compared to webMethods.

I have been working with the BusinessWorks solution for one year.

I have not had any stability issues with the TIBCO solution.

I am not involved in the type of infrastructure related to scalability; I am just a user.

The technical support is not assigned to me; it is assigned to another team.

Positive

I was involved with webMethods. From my perspective, it was faster to learn than TIBCO.

I was not involved in the setup implementation process. It was implemented a long time ago.

I recommend TIBCO BusinessWorks. It's a great software for any enterprise to set up an implementation application to be a middleware point to communicate systems with each other. 

Users should have network and infrastructure experience, as well as API implementation experience, to use it smoothly. 

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution in the steel manufacturing industry.

We are using only plugins for the database and SAP.

TIBCO does not concentrate on solving the issues with the solution. If you persistently face any problem, you have to solve it yourself instead of having TIBCO solve it for you. The solution’s customer support should be improved.

I have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks since 2007.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

I am facing issues with the solution’s scalability in terms of plug-ins. Every department has its own database, and we are integrating with different databases in seven plants. The solution is used by around five people in the core team.

I rate the solution a five out of ten for scalability.

Whenever we raise a ticket, I'm unsatisfied with the solution's technical support. The technical support team is clumsy and does not give proper solutions. The support team will respond quickly when you raise a ticket. However, their response is insufficient as they fail to solve the problem.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is easy. The solution can be deployed within half an hour.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a nine out of ten.

TIBCO BusinessWorks is a very expensive solution. Four years ago, we purchased four products with a two-course for 20 million dollars. This is a perpetual license.

Version 5 of TIBCO BusinessWorks is very good for the manufacturing industry. However, version 6 is a little bit clumsy. The solution's pricing is heavy, but it is good for integration.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

In my company, we use TIBCO BusinessWorks for middleware integration.

The product was used in my company even before I joined. My company used TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.7 in the past. After no support was available for TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.7, my company moved to TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13. After my company discovered the end of support for TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13, my company moved to TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.14.

Apart from TIBCO BusinessWorks, I haven't worked with any other integration tools yet. I find TIBCO BusinessWorks very easy to use, configure, and it's all just drag and drop. Considering the mapping features in the solution, it is very easy to use since I don't have to write a hundred lines of code.

Based on my understanding of the market, a trend of TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition is going on, which helps one to containerize everything. TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13 or TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.14 doesn't offer containerization. From an improvement perspective, my company can decide to move to TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition.

The technical support's turnaround time is an area where TIBCO needs to consider improvements.

I have experience with TIBCO BusinessWorks for ten to twelve years. I currently use TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.14.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Getting support from TIBCO on a particular issue takes a lot of turnaround time.

The initial setup of TIBCO BusinessWorks was straightforward since we have used the solution in our organization for a long time. Because of our past experiences with the product, we have team members with experts in handling the setup phase of the solution.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

TIBCO BusinessWorks can definitely be considered a good investment for my organization, making the development phase very easy and smooth.

For evaluation, I chose webMethods.io Integration.

As per my company's current use cases, TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.X is capable of undertaking all of our tasks.

Considering the current market trends, even if someone is planning to move towards TIBCO, they won't consider TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.X, and rather consider moving towards TIBCO BusinessWorks 6 or TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition. From an ease of use and configuration perspective, I would recommend TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13.

I rate the overall product an eight to eight and a half out of ten.

I mostly use it for communication between SAP and EMEA systems. I'm using TIBCO BusinessWorks and VMS.

I like the product, especially the communication through EMS. It is a very robust system.

There is room for improvement on the learning side. I do not have the time to do much training to really understand the product in-depth because it is a vast product, and I am only using about five to ten percent of the product. I feel I can still learn a lot. There can be more training and documentation.

There could also be room for improvement with the stability. Somehow, we experience many issues on the SAP Adaptive side, where it loses the communication between TIBCO and SAP.

I have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks for more than ten years. I am not on the latest version.

It is fairly stable if it is configured correctly. We experience many issues with the SAP Adapter. Sometimes it loses the communication between TIBCO and SAP, and that is an issue I have experienced. I am not sure if that is just how it's been configured to the TIBCO environment or if it is an issue with the TIBCO software.

TIBCO BusinessWorks' scalability is good.

TIBCO is running in the background in my company, so we have developers working on it, with five people working on the product itself. We have a lot of systems that use TIBCO.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If you would like to deploy something easy, then you can deploy it in a day. If you know the product exactly and what you want to do, it is not difficult to deploy. It can take a day if you want to do a quick communication between one system and another.

If the infrastructure is already set up, you only need to do the design part. Once you have the design part in, and it tests without errors, you just need to deploy it onto the administrator. You go to BusinessWorks, log in as administrator, and then deploy it. You will need to deploy the EAR file.

When you have set up your environment and everything runs fine, you can deploy the solution on your own. You don't need a consultant.

You only need about three people for deployment if you have permanent people on it. But if they are busy with other developments, and depending on the size of the company, you will need about five people.

The deployment can be done in-house.

I am not working with the company on the finance or cost part of the system. But I think it's worth a lot.

TIBCO licensing is yearly and very costly for a company like ours. There are no extra costs involved.

We have an issue at the moment with upgrading. We wanted an upgrade and to do a clean install on another environment and get rid of the old environment afterward. But to do that, there's an overlap between the two systems, so TIBCO wants us to buy extra licensing to change environments, which is unfair to me.

If you want to use TIBCO, you must ensure you have the correct licensing and the right support for your company's needs and clarify what you expect from TIBCO. You must be sure of your plan to implement TIBCO and be sure your environment is set up correctly so you can sort out the issues.

When you get the initial training for the developers and the people who need to administer the product in-house, ensure they have the appropriate time to do that.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

TIBCO BusinessWorks is used as middleware for us.

I like TIBCO BusinessWorks because it has a user-friendly GUI for developing solutions. The palette offers a wide range of activities, making it easy to configure and drop activities into the solution.

I haven't encountered any drawbacks with TIBCO BusinessWorks so far. Despite being a new user for the past year, everything has been smooth, including development and deployment.

Challenges with TIBCO BusinessWorks were mainly due to unclear documentation, but these were overcome by referring to comprehensive documents and raising tickets with TIBCO support.

I have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks for the past year and a half.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

The technical support is responsive and very helpful.

Positive

The deployment is straightforward and it takes five minutes. Maintenance is done once every six months by a team of two, including myself and another
server admin.

The license is expensive and I would rate it one out of ten.

Before TIBCO, we also used SEEBURGER and LogSpot, but now we primarily use TIBCO BusinessWorks.

While we haven't fully utilized TIBCO BusinessWorks for AI capabilities yet, I would recommend it, although users should consider licensing fees.

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

We currently have 500 or more than 1,000 applications of TIBCO BusinessWorks. Our primary use case for the solution is the apps leader operations batch. We have users all across the globe. We have business in Japan, Amsterdam, the US, and Korea, among other countries. Whenever we need to perform region-specific activities when a region is not there – like region-related calculations, for example, we use TIBCO BusinessWorks. Even if a region is around, there will be some midday activities that we need data from different systems. All the backend-related logic and business rules are there in TIBCO BusinessWorks.

Good TIBCO BusinessWorks features are the admin console and the ability to roll back to the previous version.

The biggest problem with TIBCO BusinessWorks is the licensing costs. It's too expensive. We are planning to migrate from TIBCO BusinessWorks to Camel. On the enterprise side, we will use Kafka and Pulsar.

It's not just the license that is expensive with TIBCO BusinessWorks. Scaling with the solution is costly because if we need to scale up, we have to buy more memory. That means more money. Solutions like Camel or Pulsar come with built-in options to scale horizontally, vertically, region-wide or country-wide. 

There are many other issues with TIBCO BusinessWorks, actually. For example, TIBCO BusinessWorks files can only be opened if you have TIBCO Designer. This is again more cost on top of what I mentioned above. Compiling or opening a file should not be an additional cost. If a person does not have TIBCO Designer on their machine and they receive a TIBCO BusinessWorks file, they will not be able to understand the logic or go through the source code. That's the biggest limitation. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks mentioned that we can directly inject or connect with Java, but that's not easy. I would say it has many limitations. They will expect us to follow their protocol in injecting Java or any third-party library.

In addition, when we deploy, you have to add a class part. It would be better if we were expected to add a class part only in some cases. This is not user-friendly.

Overall, TIBCO BusinessWorks has not evolved properly over time. So, right now, if you compare it to other solutions that have evolved drastically, TIBCO BusinessWorks will pale in comparison. It's an outdated product.  

I would say that they have to change their original design. The market is such these days that a solution needs to be able to handle live calculations and transactions – millions of transactions per second and billions of transactions per hour. 

For example, if you have a server in the US and you have business users in Japan. You will have an integration with Japan and so the network IO always plays a very critical role when it comes to millions or billions of transactions. What happens in such cases, with the latest technology and tools available in the market, you can add, put memory, or replicate the server per country or per region. You can't do this with TIBCO BusinessWorks. With TIBCO BusinessWorks you just have an option to deploy everything on one server and then access that server.

TIBCO BusinessWorks also needs to introduce multi-trading. It is definitely not there or if it is, it's expensive. 

I have been using TIBCO BusinessWorks for six to seven years now. 

TIBCO BusinessWorks is not stable. I have many complex, business-critical applications and we have run into sudden issues related to them in the past. When we traced the log, we found that the issues were not created by changes we implemented in our business logic. They were just random issues. Also, sometimes the memory usage spikes up. We face these issues frequently with TIBCO BusinessWorks.

Scalability with TIBCO BusinessWorks is problematic for us as it is expensive. It is also not possible to scale up TIBCO BusinessWorks drastically. You can scale up to a certain extent by adding memory, but that is way more expensive.

The TIBCO BusinessWorks tech support is not very responsive. It's not that great. The tech support staff is not very knowledgeable. You can get an immediate response if you start an email thread, but the investigation takes time. 

Whenever we contact support, I feel like we spend quite a bit of time going in circles. They will ask us for use case data, for example, and when we provide that, they will ask for more information. They should have a fixed template for support in certain domains for us to fill out when we reach out. They could even create a support page for us to investigate before reaching out to them. 

Neutral

When we started six or seven years ago, we could choose between TIBCO BusinessWorks or Office's Shell. The clear choice between the two was TIBCO BusinessWorks as it has more advantages.

But later on, as things improved in the IT world, Apache became a better solution as it is open source. At the same time, it's backed by Java. It has significantly more features compared to TIBCO BusinessWorks and, at the same time, its licensing cost is almost zero because it's open source.

The initial setup was complex. On a scale of one to five, with one being simple and five being complex, I would give the initial setup process a three and a half. 

The initial setup was done both in-house and with help from a third party. We hired an expert to onboard us. Then, when we were done with the knowledge transition, we created a team to manage the deployment and everything else. This is another reason why TIBCO BusinessWorks is problematic. You need separate expert teams for configurations, deployment, and everything else. A developer cannot do any of that.

We now have a maintenance team of 10 people for TIBCO BusinessWorks. The solution requires daily maintenance. This is because some of our applications are critical and sensitive and we do not want to run into any disruptions or have any negative impact on the business. We have people monitoring usage daily, 24/7. 

The solution is too expensive. It's one of the most expensive solutions out there, particularly because there are so many open-source competitors on the market. I don't know the exact numbers, however. 

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would give this solution a four for overall performance. 

We use the solution for business integration.

The ability to link to different technologies is valuable to us. The graphical user interface is also valuable to us.

The initial setup is not easy.

I have been using the solution for the last ten years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten. My organization has around 3000 users.

We contact the technical support team from time to time. The support personnel are usually good.

Positive

The initial setup has a technical learning curve. The product is deployed on the cloud. The deployment took less than half an hour. Everything is automated. However, It took us years to get to the automation.

We deployed the solution in-house.

We received an ROI within two years.

The product is not cheap. However, the pricing is reasonable.

I would definitely consider the solution for any integration as long as we can find skilled resources. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.