webMethods Integration Server Reviews

It interfaces between applications, as well as between the cloud and our existing on-prem applications.

We primarily utilize packaged applications; we don't really have a lot of custom applications. We do have a few custom interfaces, and some vendors may have created a custom interface on their own, but we present a standard integration, a standard enterprise service bus, to connect to.

We're able to secure our front-end website away from our back-end systems using Integration Server. It acts as a go-between. That way, whether we're requesting things from our website or our IBR or our IPT, we can have multiple interfaces. They're secured in their own ways, and they don't have direct access to our back-end databases.

We're a utility company and before we got this application we would actually send out people to the meters to read them. Sometimes they had handheld devices, but sometimes they had to walk up to the meters. When we switched to AMI meters, we leveraged the ability of the solution to talk to each of the meters on a daily basis, as well as to turn a meter on and off in real time.

Additionally, we use the same application to process payments. Before this solution, we primarily had walk-in centers and a lot of manual processes for receiving payments. Very few payments were done online or via eCheck. Now we can have a whole host of payment options, as well as enable different payment vendors to connect. It has automated a lot of our manual processes.

webMethods Integration Server provides a single hybrid integration platform for all our needs. It provides reusability. We don't have to worry about taking each and every point-to-point integration. Now we are hosting a true enterprise service bus, by having a set of APIs that can really be leveraged and reused by multiple vendors and multiple connectors.

Its adapters and connectors provide the fastest way for us to build an integration. We're able to turn things around pretty quickly. I'm sure there are other faster ways that other people have done, but this meets our needs. 

It's helped us to become more modern. It's allowed us to service our customers in the ways that they want. They can now use on-the-phone payments or website payments or whatever way they want to do it.

Internally, it provides a standard way for us to be able to interface with things. Now, we don't have to have unique ways to do so and much more code and numerous ideas on how to do things. We just end up having a standard.

It provides us with ease of modifying and redeploying integrations. We have been able to do that very successfully. It just makes it easier. We were able to put in an Agile framework, which means that as requirements come up and changes are made, we're able to schedule them on a regular basis. But we were doing that for the long-term before, as well.

Its support for the latest standards make it possible to plug in modern tooling. We've used that in several places, especially for IoT integrations. The result has been reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction.

The most valuable feature is its ability to quickly spin up connections between the real-time interfaces, as well as being able to regulate how much traffic moves back and forth between applications. This is important because one of the things that we utilize it for is payments from our customers. We can have multiple customers utilizing the same set of APIs and they can make real-time payments into our system, which is really useful. We don't have to worry about people making duplicate payments or providing incorrect information. And we get that information right away.

Also, the solution has a very comprehensive and versatile set of connectors. I've been able to utilize it for multiple, different mechanisms. We do a lot of SaaS and we do have IoT devices and the solution is comprehensive in those areas. There's a standard utility protocol for talking and several of the applications we have utilize that utility. It's a standard set of APIs, and Integration Server adapted to that right away. For our website we're utilizing standard Wisdom APIs and we were able to create that. The solution is very versatile with all its capabilities and is able to do what we need to do. We even use it for Salesforce.

It provides us application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, and APIs. We haven't used it for microservices. That range of features is very important to us. It conducts our real-time payment applications, as well as our real-time integrations between our internal applications.

The logging capability has room for improvement. That way, we could keep a history of all the transactions. It would be helpful to be able to get to that without having to build a standalone solution to do so.

I have used webMethods Integration Server for about 12 years.

We haven't had any issues. Everything has been working. We like the new version, the new upgrades. It seems they keep improving upon things. We've put in high-availability and fault tolerant solutions so we have had zero downtime due to the system itself.

We haven't run into any limitations up until now. We utilize it for a lot of different things, but we haven't run into any speed issues or other problems.

We end up talking to our customers using the solution and we have over 250,000 customers. Our internal users don't really even notice it. They just see that everything is up and running and available in real time.

We haven't run into an issue requiring technical support from their side. It's usually something that we have to adapt to or modify. It's usually something internal.

We used eCheck. It was website-based for point to point integrations. We switched to Integration Server to improve speed to market and have a quicker way to turn things around. We also wanted to put in some newer interfaces that would talk to all of our customers.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to quickly utilize some templates, things that they already had, to get it up to speed.

We took our time. We developed and deployed our first product in eight months. Then, over the course of time, we were able to add more and more until we had a robust solution.

Our implementation strategy was to look at business needs to prioritize things.

In terms of maintenance, it only requires oversight, nothing too obtrusive. We've got one integration engineer dedicated to all of our integrations and we haven't had any issues yet.

webMethods provided the name of a third-party and then we reached out to them and we got them onboard. The company's name was Kellton Tech and they did a very good job. They're still with us.

We were able to realize ROI fairly quickly because we were able to reduce a lot of the manual work and point-to-point integrations. If you think of truck costs and the amount of gas expense, we don't have to worry about those on a daily basis anymore. Those alone would justify it.

It's a good deal for the money that we pay.

We went through evaluation criteria with three or four vendors and we found this one to be the best. The primary advantages of this solution were the supportability and ease of use. Also, the deployment time was reduced and development was more Java-based.

Start with proofs of concept. Create a few good proofs of concept and get it up and running and you'll be able to escalate things. Make them achievable.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the solution is that I should have envisioned it a little bit bigger. We had a lot of point-to-point solutions that we could have considered and I think we still have a lot more to go. Also, if the back-end is not available, we should build in some logic that says, "Okay, now that I'm not getting a valid response or any response, I should be able to quickly use a default or turn off some features." We're trying to redesign and re-engineer it for that to happen.

As an overall product and solution, it has met our needs.

We are looking to use webMethods as part of our business process management solution. We have a mainframe and it facilitates connectivity with our database.

The designer is very helpful in developing services.

Interacting with and developing services is very fast. As long as the requirements are clear, developing service will take no longer than one or two working days.

The tool is very powerful and user-friendly. For example, I have a new team member and within one or two months, they are able to write and deploy services. Once you have a basic understanding of it, you can begin developing.

We would like to have a gateway server included, where we can control the number of requests.

There is an interface in webMethods for building a portal, but we are not using it because the price of the license is too high.

I would like to have a dashboard where I can see all of the communication between components and the configuration. As it is now, it is a lengthy search process. When a request comes in, sometimes you have to go to the administration page and then search the web after that. I need to be able to trace the flow from the port to the service to find the issue and there is no diagram to show me the parts. This is something that would be helpful.

I have been working with WebMethods for more than seven years, since 2012.

We have no complaints about stability.

Scalability has not been a problem for us.

We have not needed to contact technical support.

Our in-house team is responsible for maintenance.

This is an expensive product and we may replace it with something more reasonably priced.

We are considering switching to WSO2 Enterprise Integrator because the pricing is better.

My advice to anybody who is considering this product is that it is a very powerful tool that will empower the development of services. If there is a proper plan then it can be achieved within a short period of time. After a service has been developed and tested, it is moved to the staging environment. Once it is tested, we move it to production. Moving it will not take more than a few minutes.

It is definitely a product I recommend to people who have the money to pay for it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

webMethods provides the ESB backbone for us since more than 8 years without any hick ups

High throughput and excellent scalability.

Programming model with flow is hopelessly outdated. Forced migration from MessageBroker to Universal Messaging requires large scale reimplementation for JMS

ESB is rock solid. Products on top of Integration Server have much less stability.

No. Absolute top.

Webmethods ESB works, but support is layered an requires escalation every so often

We used IBM MQ Series and migrated due to licensing issues.

Significant topics with bespoke programming model (FLOW language), difficult to find experts and if, they are expensive. Wouldn't do it again.

Mixed team with vendor.

N/A

Initialy good pricing and good, if it comes to Enterprise license agreements.

It's a rather mature solution with lot's of design choices we would not accept in 2017. We are in fact considering to leave to other products.

The tool helps with the integration between multiple entities at the same time.

webMethods Integration Server needs to add more adapters. 

The product is very stable. 

webMethods Integration Server is scalable. We use it daily. 

webMethods Integration Server's setup was straightforward. The tool's deployment took one to two hours to complete. 

I would rate webMethods Integration Server an eight out of ten. 

There are actually a lot of valuable features. Terracotta is a very good component that enables us to arrange data caching and look at the solid state. Also, the API gateway is a very good component that can handle relevant caching and integrations and also load permitting. There is a message term for this. There are many components that we are currently using and all of them are very important. Also, we will use the DPM for workflow management and digital user transformation in the future.

I think they need to improve the API gateway to be able to replace F5 for example. Also, handling the certificates and their implications with other applications needs some improvement.

We need more dashboards and reporting engines that can provide detailed information for management. In short, we need better analytics.

It is stable, but it depends on the development team, not the platform itself. The platform itself is stable and has been used before by a lot of big companies and entities, but the old integration services are not related or tightly coupled with the platform itself. If you don't have good developers that can implement a good architecture or a good design, you will have issues.

It is easy to scale. We can really scale it up. We have had no issues with this.

Right now, we have an establishment of one organizer per platform but our plan is to use it as the only, single point of integration. The entire enterprise, all applications through all departments, and all IT will use the platform.

We are planning to increase the usage of the platform continuously over the next five years.

Currently, we have an incident open with them, but I think we need to give them more clarifications about it. There may be an issue with the product itself or perhaps it is from the implementation side. We couldn't reach a conclusion yet. We are supported 24 hours a day, it's full support.

Overall we are satisfied with the support because the main advantage is actually that you find someone to help you in time. Anything after is solvable; you will reach a solution. The ability to find someone dedicated is the main advantage.

I have an establishment of the IT department and the solution team but we were migrating from an old architecture and old application integration. It wasn't a platform, but rather a mix of solutions including webMethods but an older version. Now we have migrated from this older version to our new version. But we are migrating among a different integration solution.

Some parts were straightforward, but installing the platform was a little complex, especially since we use Linux instead of Windows. Opening ports, network restrictions, managing the network, and managing the users and components were all a little bit complex.

We did it on our own here, in our company. We have installed it over about four environments: development, SIT, production, and pre-production. All of this has taken about one month to finish.

It is expensive, but we reached a good agreement with the company. It is still a little bit expensive, but we got a better deal than the previous one.

My advice is to put more focus on implementation rather than on the platform itself. This is more important than the platform because finding someone that knows how to fit the components is more important than having very good components that no one knows how to use.

I would rate this as eight out of ten, because of the scope we have already implemented. We didn't face many complex issues or troubles.

• Traditional ESB solutions using multiple adapters
• API development and management.

• The time to market is relatively less.
• It's simple to learn for Java users.
• Its administration is easier.
• Extensive toolset: out-of-the-box libraries support.
• DevOps could be better.

• API development
• Traditional ESB development
• B2B development.

• DevOps support
• Java services debugging.

I've been developing with SAG webMethods in Telco industries for integrating provisioning (CRM) end-to-end Billing, BSS and OSS, Banks/Insurance/Finance integrating bancassurance, provisioning, Switching&Allocation and Government Instance (Oil and gas) integrating B2B oil company to government reporting.

Time effective by cutting down development time and resource efficient to developer burden, enhance agility and integration between end-to-end applications, platform

The Integration Server

It's obvious that the heart of the product lies here. It's comprised of all aspects of ESB (Enterprise Gateway, Adapter, TN, Java) and BPM (task, rules engine).

Universal Messaging

Universal Messaging is a Message Orientated Middleware product that covers JMS, MQTT, AMQP.

Universal Messaging design supports both broker-based and umTransport communication, and thus comprises client and server components. The server component has specific design features to support each of these classifications of client, as well as Scheduling and Triggers, Plugins, Federation, Clustering, and Low Latency IO.

The Java Service section, which is probably needs more different manners for a new developer. It doesn't represent OOP very well, just a method and proprietary interface for input parameter called IData, which consists of Maps (key, value). You can still be creating classes under the shared section of the methods. But also the documentation of webMethods Java API it doesn't cover much clarity for the usage

Regarding the Stateful session inbound to ESB (Integration Server). It seems that the Stateful session sometimes doesn't die out when the transaction is finished, but waits until the timeout expires (although quite often it doesn't even died even after timeout expires, which eventually would flooding the server).

You have to buy another license for clustering named Terracotta which also had several different license, basically it was acting as a multicast and a cache, so if one of your node is processing something it would write into Terracotta, and then the other node would recognize some process going on so it wouldn't try to do the same processes which would be make double transaction for instance. It also can be use for data cache so you could have better performance fetching frequently data called rather than query it somewhere else e.g Database or REST Resources

Around 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. They don't help much enough actually, if there's any bug we have to wait for another patching rather than get emergency help

No, they won the PoC in the beginning. And mentioned as Leader in Gartner

Quite complex in setting up the BPM environment, the UDDI service (Centrasite), and also the API Management. But nonetheless there's documentation for each product 

I've been in vendor/consultant so I have enough experience to do it my own in-house.

I never done the accounting, I'm an engineer ?

I suppose webMethods aim for large-scale enterprises which is why the price is high, but with high output and better outcomes.

Some of the licensing is "component-ized," which is confusing to new users/customers.

Yet you can also choose between perpetual or periodically terms, in case you do not want to be bothered to buy another version once the newer version released you should consider periodic license.

Yes, TIBCO (was good enough IMHO) and Oracle Fusion Middleware (it's quite complicated IMHO).

I have to say that all SoftwareAG products are tightly proprietary, which means you can't just download and install for study purposes or to play around with them. You have to call their partner/product representative just to download the trial, which is quite different from their competitors. That makes the product unfamiliar to mid-low enterprises.

Also, their products are "componentized" in terms of licensing and tightly coupled, which means that some components may be licensed while some are a prerequisite to other components. So it could be that you have to buy two to get one and a half (pretty amazing isn't). But overall it is a great product.

Another thing is that made me bit upset was that the certification/training in South East Asia (which is my region) is not "individual friendly," meaning that if you want to get developer certified, you have to join to one of their partner companies or bulk order.

We're using it for managing secure file transfers for the company.

We have a reusable code that we can replicate for any new interfaces.

Ease of use.

The newest version, which we are not on, has all the features that we are looking for, meaning managed files transfer adapter.

It is stable. They are rather aggressive in their patches and upgrades.

It seems to be doing very well.

We got the product via a reseller, and the support from the reseller has been less than desirable.

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We enlisted help from the reseller with the initial setup.

I have only heard of Software AG, Talend, and MuleSoft.

Look at the stability of the company, and also take a close look at the pricing. Lower pricing doesn't necessarily mean it's a better product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Features
• Support.