webMethods.io Reviews

Most of our customers are real estate development companies, and they build many projects in Saudi Arabia. Most of their projects are about Smart Cities or Smart destinations. The use case was about integrating different Smart City technologies and enterprise applications. For government services, the use case was integrating webMethods.io Integration into different government systems serving residents. For example, the Ministry of Interior uses the solution for passport and ID services, so different government systems are integrated.

We used webMethods.io Integration as an integration platform. It accommodates Enterprise Service Bus, integration server and API gateway. We took the complete platform and the integration server as part of the platform to integrate or receive data from the API gateways, integrated with the Enterprise Service Bus.

The solution allowed us to integrate applications and IoT devices because it has an IoT event processing layer. It provides a flexible integration within the IoT systems because most of the applications we work with are related to the IoT and Smart City technologies. So, there's hardware, software and application integration, providing hosting flexibility.

Some platform providers host their applications in Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, which sometimes creates challenges for data governance because of regulations.

Any solution needs continuous development in integration and processing.

We used the solution for more than a year for different projects. We used the latest version and stopped using it four months ago. It was deployed on private cloud in the customer cloud infrastructure.

The solution is stable. If there were any minor problems, we resolved them.

It can be scaled up and support multi-tenancy. However, it is difficult to maintain.

I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward.

They don't have a fixed price, and the pricing model is transaction-based. I rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. I recommend it, but it depends on the use case. I do not see any gaps with the platform.

I have used webMethods Integration Server in a variety of roles over the past eight years, starting as a developer and progressing to integration specialist where my work entailed building enterprise solutions to process a lot of data (millions of records each day) using event-driven architecture.

Our primary use case is retail integration where there are a lot of orders being placed daily, and where all the inventory needs to be updated in the centralized system. It's mainly in the retail and banking sectors, or anywhere transactions may play a crucial role, where I have used webMethods the most in my projects.

Typically, it is used where data has to be going to multiple systems on-the-fly, such that there will be minimal latency. For example, in an event-driven process where there is an action trigger for a piece of data or record to be forwarded to multiple systems when that action has been triggered.

The latest versions I have worked with include 10.5 and 10.3, however at the moment and for the past year I have been working with MuleSoft more than webMethods.

Our infrastructure is mainly on-premises, but we are starting to move to the cloud. Our target is to move everything to cloud, and right now we have a few instances on-premises and a few in the cloud, hosted privately with Microsoft Azure.

As for users, we are not directly exposed to the clients or end-users. Instead, we are mainly part of the middleware layer, whereas many of our customer-facing portals are different and distinct from one another. If we counted from one portal, the users may go into the thousands or even billions sometimes. It depends on the transaction type that is involved. For example, if you take any store of the multiple stores in operation, we will get a daily number of orders and that number of transactions will go through our system. Ultimately, it differs from region to region and client to client, but the numbers on any store can be from thousands to 10,000 or more.

One valuable feature is that it is event-driven, so when new data is available on the source it can be quickly processed and displayed. Integration is definitely another useful feature, and B2B is one area where webMethods has its own unique thing going, whereby we can do monitoring of transactions, monitoring of client onboarding, and so on.

There are many valuable things from an EDA perspective, and webMethods helpfully supports a lot of formats. Considering their market strategies, I think webMethods has it all. And now there is webMethods.io, which is a complete cloud-based solution provider. Unfortunately, they are mainly known in the market for their broker transactions, and this is a perception I believe needs to be overcome.

Lastly, although I'm not too sure about the latest features, I believe they also have a service designer now, where you can work out the particular package that you want. 

The certifications and learning resources are not exposed openly enough. For instance, they have a trial version which comes with only a few basic features, and I think that community-wise they need to offer more free or open spaces where developers can feel encouraged to experiment. Perhaps they can work on maintaining more of a community in order to build up a better knowledge base, which is exposed on the free plans and not tagged to a particular paid version.

Otherwise, I think they have already built all the solutions as an individual component, so what they have currently should be fine. Based on the market, the new features should come up as usual, and I hope to see a lot of connectors become available with regard to NoSQL databases, Salesforce, CRM systems, and so on. And with these, I mean plug-and-play types of connectors, where we can easily experiment and see which products work well in the integration scheme, and which will help us decide whether to go with webMethods or not.

I've been using webMethods Integration Server for over eight years.

Compared to on-premises, the cloud solution is not as stable. These days I see a lot of network issues and cloud servers going down, becoming unreachable for whatever reason.

The cloud plays a major role in its scalability. When it comes to on-premise, it's not that scalable, as you will need to have a server and a standard process around that which will reduce the delay. In general, it's not that easy to get a system scalable when it is on-premise, especially when compared with the cloud as it's much easier to scale a system horizontally or vertically with any number of resources.

Their support is always good. We used to have regular meetings with the vendor where they explained things and gave details about new features and products that are going to be launched down the line. And if there are any product bugs, we align with their support to get things sorted out. We have a good relationship and approach with the vendor, who adheres to their SLAs.

The initial setup was more of an administrator task, so I did not participate in it directly. However, as far as I know, the software that comes with the installer is a complete package so we just needed to install it. It does require a bit of information which needs to be addressed prior to getting installed, though.

When it comes to code deployment, the code and packages that we work on go through the servers with CI/CD pipelines.

We do our implementations in-house only, with the help of automation. The number of engineers needed depends on the requirements for each project. At this moment, there is one person who takes care of the automation and troubleshooting of issues because it's all centralized and we don't have a dedicated team to do the deployments.

As we are all into different sectors, we typically release with all the teams together, and the release window doesn't account only for the team or the tools we're using, but it is also dependent on the complete functionality desired. So when there is a deployment planned with other teams, everyone has to release their code and do a round of testing, and then validate if everything works properly. It has multiple verifications and if something goes down then we have to report it. As such, I don't give timelines because it depends on the release, but typically webMethods' package deployment doesn't take that much time unless there are network issues.

I am not involved in the licensing side of things.

Whether you decide to use webMethods largely depends on the architectural landscape that the customer is looking at, and in particular what kind of flow data they want to process. It's always a matter of first getting the customer requirements, and then going with the tool that is easiest to implement and use.

Overall, I would rate webMethods Integration Server a seven out of ten.

We use ActiveTransfer to call internal APIs and transfer files from a third party to the cloud for application purposes and from a third party to on-prem. We also send files to the third party sometimes. We have a payments system and transfer files across the system to make customer domains.

We have on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployments and transfer files across all of them. We're working with webMethods cloud, AWS, and Azure. Our eight-member team is using webMethods MFT and other integrations, and we have a shared team to work on multi-technologies, like web issues, Snowflake, webMethods MFTs, etc. 

ActiveTransfer lets us maintain the file in the staging area before we transfer it. After that, we can remove the file to make sure that the reconciliation process is done. Sometimes we will zip and unzip the files, but if we have a GKB file, we often ignore it. 

Some things could be improved, especially how ActiveTransfer handles third-party file transfers. It would be nice to have a native file-watching mechanism for when you're scheduling jobs with a third-party scheduler. 

Currently, we are using an outside file watcher solution to check the files before the file transfer. It checks the location to see if the file is there. If the file is there, it will prepare it for transfer. If the file isn't available, it will send an email it can create a ticket send it now. We recommended adding this file watcher mechanism. 

Also, when we're dealing with massive files, ActiveTransfer requires huge amounts of RAM, but if would be helpful if we could customize the compression and encryption to squeeze that data and reduce the size to save on system resources.

We have been using ActiveTransfer for six or seven years.

ActiveTransfer is stable.

ActiveTransfer is easy to scale and use also, which is why we recommend it. We have a script-based file transfer, but we use it less compared to MFT.

webMethods' technical support is excellent. When we have issues with third parties, networks, corrupted files, etc. we send the logs and they take care of it.

The difference between webMethods and Control-M is that Control-M schedules automation tools and checks to see if the file is there. Our team is currently using Control-M. 

If you use MFT and you've cleared the MFT events, it has to schedule through Control-M because all the jobs running through the solution end to end. Control-M has an AMF advance remain file transfer, where you can create a source and target profile.

Setting up ActiveTransfer is straightforward. I rate it eight out of 10 for ease of setup. As for maintenance, we have a monitoring mechanism in place and an automated process for large-scale transfer. If the current available space at the target is less than 30 percent, we have an alert.

We do it all in-house based on the customer's request. We'll keep all the files in the staging for one week. If necessary, we will remove it or move it to some other location. This kind of housekeeping and maintenance we do.

I'm not aware of the exact cost. That product team at my company is responsible when we need any maintenance, new products, upgrades, etc. 

I rate webMethods ActiveTransfer eight out of 10. They only need to improve a few minor things to bring it to the current market standard. My recommendation to webMethods is to add more flexibility to the file-watching mechanism to reduce the load on the RAM and CPU to a minimum, which will help when we are dealing with large numbers of massive files, especially in the retail environment.

We used to deal with millions of small files. When you are dealing with these kinds of files, you need to ensure that there is an internal reconciliation process. When you're reading and transferring thousands of files, you use a parallel instead of sequential mechanism to ensure all the files reach a target and that the reconciliation process is done automatically.

By Software AG, we are also using Integration Server, Trading Networks, Active Transfer, Optimize for Infrastructure, My webMethods, and their EDI package. As long as there is product parity between products, it makes sense to continue using multiple products from the same vendor. Obviously, you want to make sure you have a diverse portfolio. Where those products start breaking those links, you want to make sure that you are using the best product for your company in this region.

The fact that we were already using another solution from this vendor affected our decision to go with this particular product, mainly from a cost standpoint. As is any product in this region, the biggest cost is almost always the upfront cost of laying out the solution. Also, there are some costs in having that solution already available: between knowledge of the platform, having the licensing rights, and if you bring in a new solution, then you are now paying for two solutions.

The native integrations between the vendors' products are very seamless. The products interact very well. At times, it's kind of hard to tell where one product ends and the next one starts. As new products come in, the integrations probably take one or two updates before they are fully integrated. However, once products are fully integrated, it is very seamless and easy to hop between one product to another.

Using multiple products from the same vendor creates efficiencies:

1. In terms of knowledge. Obviously, there is a familiarity with the product and how you expect Software AG's products to act and respond. 
2. In terms of operational understanding between end users who are looking for specific data. They know how these products work and how to pull up these reports. 
3. In terms of having administrators overseeing these products.

There is a cost savings for using many of the same products. There are lower training costs. Also, typically, there are a lot of integrations that you ended up needing to build out, whether they be custom or out-of-the-box. Even if they are out-of-the-box, a lot of times that takes a lot of work to get those to work. However, since we are using Software AG products, it's very much like installing a plugin into an Excel program.

There was a reduction in the learning curve because we had already used the vendors' products. The products used work very similarly. In terms of verbiage, key aspects, or three-letter acronyms, you don't have to relearn any of those. There is an expectation of how these products will work. These products always work the same way when Software AG is rolling these types of products out.

We use webMethods Integration Server for two main aspects: 

1. For application-to-application integrations.
2. B2B: The transferring of on-premise data out to other business partners.

As with any integration platform, it is a single pane of glass that allows you to see and interact with transactions as they are flowing. Out-of-the-box, Software AG offers robust monitoring solutions to help you understand if a solution's up or down transactions aren't working, etc. The tool has been invaluable to our organization in terms of understanding where our data is, how it's flowing, and its current status.

Having a single hybrid-integration platform for all our needs is very important. From an IT perspective, it is a way for us to easily troubleshoot and quickly resolve issues. From a business perspective, it's very important because IT is readily available to assist with any system issues which are happening at that time. Anytime that you have applications talking to each other, it is a breeding ground for problems and issues. Having a solution like webMethods Integration Server in place can empower your IT department to be able to resolve issues and roll out solutions quickly as new applications come into your portfolio.

We have been on webMethods Integration Server for 15 years. We just got rid of our mainframe. It works wonders with our mainframe. With SaaS and cloud applications, webMethods Integration Server does not answer this need by itself. This is where you would be looking for APIs or custom plugins to work with those types of solutions. 

It is very open. It is extremely rare for us to find something that we are trying to integrate, but we can't integrate it. In the past seven years, I don't think that has ever happened. For any problem that we are looking at, the Software AG solution can solve. That has probably been the most valuable feature.

Application integrations are offered out-of-the-box, and that is extremely important to us. This is one of the main use cases that we have for it. It is about 60 to 70 percent of the workload in our application today.

Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is probably the future and direction that many companies and organizations are looking at. Software AG is also rolling out robust solutions for this. So, if I was a brand new customer, that is where I would be looking. This is also the direction that I think Software AG is moving into along with almost every vendor in the industry. However, the integration platform, as it currently sits, runs really well. It's very robust and does what you would expect it to do.

My organization moved onto the webMethods platform 15 years ago. I have been using it for the past seven years.

Software AG is a partner who has been around for many years. The company is not going anywhere. Regarding the solution, you can get the capabilities that you need out of it.  It is a known solution that works really well and does exactly what you would expect it to do.

Software AG's full support for the solution’s adapters and connectors brings long-term stability to our services and integrations. Software AG has many SMEs in each region, both globally and in each product type. Being able to have access to a subject-matter expert in the specific tool or region that I'm looking for is invaluable. I feel like I am talking to someone who has hands-on experience in either developing the solution or has many years of experience with the product or similar customers. They also have people who just work in specific business groups. For example, if I'm looking for a knowledge worker to do something with IoT, then they have people ready who can answer specific questions about products that we might be looking to integrate with.

The solution is very scalable. If you want more webMethod Integration Servers, it is very easy to spin them up. It's very easy to apply packages to each one of those solutions. Or, if you want to just have one large webMethods Integration Server, it is easy to create the configuration settings to allow that JVM to have more memory.

There are less than 20 users. A solution like this is normally a back-end solution. Obviously, we have administrators who are overseeing the product to make sure it's up, patched, available, and secure. Developers who are rolling out new solutions and debugging any issues going on in production or lower environments. Then, the third group is probably the business users. That is a very small hand full of users at our company. Those users are typically looking just to make sure that the data is flowing as they would expect. For example, I expect a certain file to go out to this customer every day. That business user has access to log into the application and pull that file.

The product is used extensively at my organization. Out of all our integrations, it probably counts for 60 to 70 percent. Every minute of every day, it's being used. I think the usage that we have in place today is correct. If we were to expand any further, we would probably be looking at iPaaS solutions.

Their technical support is very good. I have never had any issues with the support or getting the resources that I need.

Two months ago, Software AG did have a data breach, so their support desk got shut down. It has been down since then, and that has not been a pleasant experience. Prior to that, it was a pleasant experience. I think Software AG has been reeling from that, but there are ways to get a hold of their support desk. This ensures that their customers still have access to support, which has been available and out there. However, they did have a public exposure, which has ended up causing some loopholes for their customers.

Upgrades are complex. They typically take about five months from start to finish. There are many packages that plug into webMethods Integration Server, which is the central point for a vast majority of the transactions at my organization. Anytime we are upgrading that, there are complexities within each component that we must understand. That makes any upgrade very cumbersome and complicated. That has been my experience at this company. Because there are many different business units that we are touching, there are so many different components that we are touching. The amount of READMEs that you have to go through takes some time.

This is where we would need to look at an iPaaS solution or moving to work with microservices solutions. Obviously, the smaller you make the solution, the more you're able to in an agile fashion.

From a high-level implementation strategy, we do a waterfall approach. That is the approach that we have ended up following for upgrading this solution.

Deploying solutions is very easy. The biggest thing that any company has to look at, because we have had a couple of pitfalls in this, is you have to look at how you're rolling your solution out. So, if you end up stacking or creating common services in the solution, those solutions become very tricky as they start to age, as any development cycle would end up having. The smaller you create the solution, the easier it is to keep rolling out those solutions, and staying away from common services really allows you to continue to roll out with ease.

As new solutions roll out or there is a different way for these apps to integrate, it has been fairly easy for developers to make the modified changes needed. The biggest thing is always knowledge because there have been some integrations that haven't been touched for 15 years. Then, if someone needs to touch one of those integrations, there is a learning curve in understanding how that integration works and what they are looking at.

Having a product like this is invaluable to any company in terms of the amount of time that IT gets to save in terms of integrating different products as well as having an open way to ensure that these applications are working. If you were to do this out of the box for each one of those solutions, while the upfront costs would be cheaper, the long-term stability of your applications would definitely degrade. As you are rolling this out for products that probably run your business, that's probably not a direction that any long-term company would want to go. I know my organization has seen time savings from not going with in-house built integrations from app to app.

For the B2B, we are probably saving somewhere between five to 10 full-time resources who would be working on this manually. For application-to-application, it probably has cut down 50 percent of our downtimes at a minimum. When you're talking about application-to-application integration, that is the thing that you would probably end up using as a key metric. For the amount of downtime that we have, I would double the amount or length of downtime that we would have if we didn't have this solution.

Currently, the licensing solution for this product is pretty straightforward. The way that Software AG has moved in their licensing agreements is very understandable. It is very easy for you to see where things land. Like most vendors today, they are transaction based. Therefore, just having a good understanding of how many transactions that you are doing a year would be very wise. Luckily, there are opportunities to work with the vendor to get a good understanding of how many transactions you have and what is the right limit for you to fall under.

With any solution like this, on day one you have a project that you're trying to work on, but just understand where you are trying to go with the solution. Some plugins are cheaper than others, and others are more expensive than others. Just make sure that you understand the full scope of what you might end up using the product for, so you can understand the all-in costs.

The tool works extremely well. Software AG offers packaged solutions for many packaged apps. Oracle SQL Server or Salesforce are add-ons that you can purchase and install easily for plug and play with packaged solutions. When you start moving into custom applications, there are no packaged solutions. The good news is that typically custom apps are built in some type of known technology, and that technology can easily be integrated into webMethods Integration Servers.

Business-to-business communications is an add-on that needs to be purchased. While super important to my organization, it is an add-on outside of the standard webMethods Integration Server. I would strongly recommend the business-to-business add-ons, especially if you're looking to use webMethods Integration Server in that capacity. It just makes the development cycles a lot shorter as well as making it much easier to manage your business profiles.

We routinely evaluate other options. I wasn't here when we made the decision to move onto this solution, but we periodically reassessed the platform to see if we are still sitting on the best solution that is matched to our corporation.

Today, there are many newer solutions out in the marketplace, and Software AG does offer those solutions. That is a great start. If I was starting over, I might look at those alternative solutions. However, if you are an alternative solution to webMethods Integration Server (not Software AG), then I would probably be looking a lot more into the cloud. webMethods Integration Server is used in a very legacy way. For example, we are on premise with data centers, which are legacy ways to solve a problem. If my solutions were in the cloud, then I would probably be looking at webMethods Integration Cloud as Software AG offers it, or any of the other vendors, like MuleSoft. So, you have to look at:

• What am I trying to integrate today? 
• Where are those solutions sitting? 
• If everything is on-prem and you are a 110-year-old company with 50 plants across the place, then probably having an on-prem is the right solution.
• If you are an eCommerce shop, then you are probably looking more in the cloud and for a cloud solution.

The solution pays for itself, but it is complicated as it stands today. Make sure that you are using it for exactly what you have architected it for. Don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

We have been moving away from data integration for webMethods Integration Server. So, it's becoming less of a priority for us.

Software AG has been moving in the direction of trying to make their tool as modern as possible. It has plugins for Docker today as well as ways to integrate into webMethods Integration Cloud. While these integrations are available, we don't use them.

I would rate webMethods Integration Server as a seven (out of 10). For what the solution can do, it does it extremely well. The upgrades are very cumbersome; they are very long and disruptive. You have to do them at least every three years. It's not a fun time for any company. If upgrades were a 100 times easier, it would get a much higher score.

Our use case is our service-oriented architecture transformation which started in 2017. It has been a three-year journey. Before that, between 2007 and 2017, we had not conducted a re-architecting of the SOA. In 2017, we had a big initiative for digital transformation at the bank to make ourselves more flexible, more agile, and competitive with all the startups and the financial industry in general, not only in Indonesia but also in other regions.

One of the critical capabilities included the integration area. That is why, in 2017, we re-architected the SOA to have layered architecture that is related closely to microservices. We are testing a new mobile banking channel to use a micro services architecture as well.

The integration use cases for webMethods involve connecting all of the back-end core systems at the bank so that they use the SOA integration server layer. Everything must go through this layer to speak or communicate with the back-end systems, such as the core banking, HR systems, and the treasury system; all the core systems that sit behind the ESB layer of the Integration Server. All the front-end systems like mobile banking, sales management, the CRM, etc., must go through this ESB layer, the integration server, to communicate with the back-end system. That is the prime use case of Integration Server.

Other than that, we successfully launched a new initiative for API about a year ago. We are commoditizing our financial services to not only be consumed by our channels, but by partners such as startups, FinTechs, InsureTechs, and other companies that would like to partner with us and use our financial services APIs.

When it comes to commoditizing for external parties, the partners, the other banks, or financial institutions that are our subsidiaries, they can connect to it and consume our services through the API Gateway products that we are providing to them. That includes sandboxing to test their applications. If they would like to partner with us, they need to register themselves and make an agreement with the bank regarding what sort of packages and fees that will be applied for the cooperation.

It's deployed on-prem. We are a banking institution. In Asia, regulators for the financial industry prohibit us from hosting financial transactions outside the Indonesian region.

Are you using multiple products from this vendor?

We are using multiple products to build the end state of our service-oriented architecture (SOA). This is all orchestrated as a big building house. Those SOAs have many capabilities inside of them on the integration side, such as webMethods Integration Server. There is also webMethods API Gateway and Software AG Apama. (Read my webMethods API Gateway review here.) Those modules inside of Software AG complement the building blocks of SOA.

We also use it to complement other products in the markets outside Software AG, such as Kafka as well as all event processing and streaming. This is in combination with the capabilities (and beyond) of what Software AG stacks can do.

I find the native integrations between Software AG products to be very useful from a plain vanilla standpoint. Though, when we implement native integrations, there needs to be slight customizations to fit them into our core legacy system, and that needs to be integrated with other systems. For plain vanilla capabilities, it is sufficient enough.

The native integrations between Software AG products also have good performance in terms of transactions per second (TPS). These are acceptable in terms of the volume and speediness of a transaction that we can produce as well as being combined with the efficiency of using the hardware, memory, and CPUs.

If you combine the commodity hardware and performance as well as the plain vanilla capabilities of internal products that Software AG has, then there is a good price per value.

It gives you a one-stop service for your integrations area. You can really rely on one vendor, then you don't have to worry about sustainability or support. This is all guaranteed by Software AG as a single stop service from them. Whereas, when you need to combine other vendors, then you need to monitor each of their solutions, sustainability, product roadmaps, etc. Then, this becomes your technology liabilities, which is something that we consider. From the integration, we are selecting a good strategic partnership with one vendor in order to maximize our productivity. Thus, we don't have to worry how we can monitor each respective vendor if we do a best of breed combination of many vendors, just to do an integration.

By selecting Software AG and using multiple products, this saved us about 72 percent, which has definitely given us more agility.

Because we were already accustomed with webMethods Integration Server way before the webMethods API Gateway, they were almost the same. We just converted our knowledge from the prior WSDL into RESTful JSON standard messages. Therefore, the learning curve was very smooth because the environment that the developers use was still the same: My webMethods Console. It uses the IDEs coming from that, saving us a lot of time with the learning curve on new technologies.

One of the improvements is that everything is currently standardized. Previously, each system had its own connection to the core and back-end systems, a point-to-point connection. It created havoc for governance of the integration itself. There were so many connections without any governance whatsoever as to how the communication happened.;

There is also an improvement on our development side. When we have requests for new business requirements, products, business processes, and integrations with partners, Integration Server has dramatically decreased our development time. That's because we have standardized all the communications to the core system in one place.

In addition, we have improved availability of the channel itself.

It definitely gives us flexibility. The first stage, with these products, is the learning and customization. Once these are underway and things run, the performance is meeting our expectations. And when new requirements arise it becomes easier and development speeds up. For each integration service, the development cycle has come down from seven days to three days, maximum. And that's for the complex integrations. We have cut the development cycle by almost 50 percent.

Modifying and redeploying integrations is very easy. It gives us a good, stable, comprehensive, end-to-end development cycle, from development to deployment. It gives us a set of tools for checking the consistency and integrity of the code, which is something we didn't have with previous solutions. When deploying to the production server, it also does validation checking, whether certain libraries are missing, for example. It helps us do consistency checks. Because of that, we have cut down the system integration testing significantly. The user acceptance testing has also been reduced significantly. The reduction in testing time is almost 50 percent, compared to our previous solution. We used to test for five days and now it's just two days of testing for each of the services.

The vendor’s full support for the solution’s adapters and connectors has helped with uptime and availability. We are close to 24/7. And the number of transactions per second, previously, was around 600 to 700. Now, it has almost doubled. We are reaching more than 1,000 TPS. We have more than 2 million transactions. It has given us that type of scalability.

The solution has helped us contribute more to the business, to the expansion of the products and the volume of transactions.

There are three features of Integration Server that are the most valuable. One is the webMethods Designer. That helps our developers develop on their own. It's very intuitive for design. It helps our developers to speed the development of services for the integrations.

The second feature is the reliability. Mandiri Bank is the largest bank in Indonesia. That translates it into a humongous volume of transactions that flow down from the channels and go through the Integration Server, and then to the core banking itself. The components of Integration Server need to have 99.999 availability. It needs to be reliable all the time, available, and to be a scalable platform.

The third of the highlights of the features of Integration Server is the small footprint for infrastructure. It can run on any commodity hardware, unlike other solutions that need to run on specific hardware. It gives us the freedom to scale the platforms and create the greatest possible agility for the organization to expand, based on the demands. The other side effect of that is the additional advantage of transforming the architecture that we currently use into more of a microservices base. It gives us more flexibility and agility, going forward.

We would like to achieve a multi-site, soft data center. Multi-site meaning that we would like to have more than two Active-Active data centers because Indonesia is a big region with three time zones. We would like to have many data centers serve us across the islands to support the massive number of transactions. We need to have a good amount of availability. Hence, we would like to have a multi-site data center. To support that, the solution needs to be capable of Active-Active implementations, an Active-Active integration server. We would like to get to the point where transactions are not only coming into one data center but, simultaneously, could be redirected to several other data center sites. Integration Server needs the capabilities to help us to achieve that goal.

Also, the solution has big instances when deployed under microservices or in a containerized platform. They need to improve that so that it is competitive with other integration solutions, like Redis and Kafka. Deployments under microservices with those solutions are much more lightweight, in the size of the runtime itself, compared with Software AG. They need to improve it to be scalable enough and lightweight enough to run on the microservices/containerized platform.

We are paying them a lot so we have access to their product development engineers. We are waiting for them to revamp the microservices areas. We are waiting for the new version of that. They have come back to us with something that is much more lightweight, but to us, it has still not reached the lightweight level that we want.

We have several products from Software AG. The product is the SOA webMethods Enterprise Service Bus. We have been using that since 2007. The second, and one of the largest, is the API Gateway. Other products include Apama Complex Event Processing and Event Stream Processing engine. Those are the three main products we are currently using as part of the service oriented architecture building-blocks at Bank Mandiri.

Given that we have been using it all these years, you can imagine the stability of the system.

We experienced major issues at the beginning of the implementation when the product was still kind of new. But over the years they improved a lot. 

They keep producing new versions at a rate that we cannot keep up with. That is a problem for us because they have a very small set of supported versions. That is a downside of their products. Old versions are supported for a very limited time. They keep telling  us, "You need to upgrade." But we do an upgrade and they introduce a new version and the one we updated to is already obsolete. Their life cycle is very short.

It can run on commodity hardware, so it is scalable using commodity hardware, like Intel processors of any brand, as long they run on the Linux operating system. They can do a clusterized environment and scale easily when transaction volume is bigger than we expect. It can actually scale on demand, and it's easy to set up by joining a new cluster into an existing cluster. It performs well in this case.

We have 60,000 to 70,000 employees at the bank. About 10,000 people are using the services we create with the solution. They are mostly in the transaction back office and they monitor the day-to-day transactions from the channels. They monitor our mobile banking, trade, finance, and treasury transactions, as well as wealth management, corporate payments, and cash management. It's typically the wholesale, retail, and the micro-banking staff who heavily use this integration. For the back office, the upper-level user is a department head, while the junior level is staff that does the monitoring, day in and day out.

When we have issues that we have not encountered, we have access to their support teams. They need to have support which is close to the Asian region. Because of the time zones there are limitations on how they respond to our support. 

They do provide us with local partners that help us more quickly. There are several severity levels of support. For level-one they provide us with good partners in Indonesia.

Since we do the transformations, we do the initial setup from the bare metal server up to the setting up of the Integration Server. We can pretty much do that ourselves, with their guides. The first time, we needed to be guided by their engineers. The setup is fairly easy, but for optimal speed and performance, we definitely reach out to their support to evaluate the configurations that we have deployed.

When we installed the new version it took two or three days, depending on how many nodes we configured. Now, it takes a maximum of one day to establish a setup for normal configurations. For the complex ones, that have many nodes or Active-Active sites, it can take three or four days.

We have one engineer for Software AG, another on the network team, and another on the server team.

For the monitoring of day-to-day operations, we have support from our internal developers. We have deployed six or seven people because this is a huge implementation of Integration Server. They cover three shifts so that we have 24/7 monitoring, using the management console. We accompany that with third-party tools that help us to monitor the performance.

We have been using the solution's adapters and connectors for our new architecture on the integration inside of Integration Server, but with help. The product is a plain vanilla platform. You can do pretty much everything, but to exploit its capabilities, you need to use their consulting to help develop and utilize them. Those capabilities are something that our internal developer was not familiar with, so we needed to engage with the Software AG engineers to help us build those adapters. The built-in adapters do not suffice because they need customization to be implemented. Each organization has its own business processes and logic that differ from one to the next. It is good as a plain vanilla, but if you want to customize it further and exploit the capabilities, you need to have their engineers working closely with you to implement and utilize all of the capabilities. 

Our back-end is a legacy system that uses a different language, so we needed to customize it. The solution helped reduce the amount of work because at least the features were already there, but it needed the customization of the engineers from Software AG in conjunction with our internal developers as the experts in our core system. Combine forces and you create your own adapters.

Integration Server provides application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, APIs, and microservices. Regarding the data adapters, we are not using their products for data integrations. The data integration space has come into the data warehouse area, and we are using other tools to do data integration. But for the transaction APIs, business processes, we are using built-in products from webMethods.

That range of features comes back to the use cases that apply to the business innovations that a business would like to implement, such as real-time transactions, asynchronous transactions, fire-and-forget. I'm sure the transactions will be successfully processed by our core systems, and that is the main goal. The other features go towards how we can enrich things, but that is a second priority. 

This solution is primarily used for protecting our APIs and web services. All of our APIs are exposed to the outside world, so our internal network is protected by the API gateway. Our landscape inside the company is also divided into different domains and if you go from one domain to another domain, we also want the APIs to be protected.

We have two servers with an API gateway and a load balancer in front of it.

We also use this solution for monitoring, to know how many transactions we have had and who is using our API. These are the runtime capabilities.

Another thing we use this product for is governance, to govern the lifecycle of our API services. It will tell us the state of the service, who is responsible for it, and what deliverables belong to that stage, and we also have some quality checkpoints inside the lifecycle.

With respect to the end-to-end lifecycle management of APIs, this product is very good, feature-wise. We have the ability to govern the end-to-end lifecycle; in the different states, we can do the necessary customization and add our own flavor. This helps us maintain it very well.

The API governance capabilities for enforcing standards and security policies are quite good. However, it is a new product that started a few years ago, and you can sometimes tell that it is new and still evolving. For example, there are some bugs and problems that are still being fixed as it is further developed. They are evolving the features and we are happy with the product, but there can be more issues that arise as things change.

These quality checkpoints allow us to have a central team that reviews the deliverables of the service. In the Design phase, for instance, we will review the REST API interface to see if it matches our standards.

This solution has enabled us to create new channels for growth because we can quickly introduce new APIs. Sometimes, you need to quickly set up a marketing campaign with an application that needs to happen fast. The API gateway allows us to introduce APIs that are still good and protected but in a fast way.

We have a good overview of all of our APIs, including who is providing them and who consuming them, which allows us to better work together to resolve issues before they emerge. For example, if there are changes made, we have a better view of the impact and the team can start discussing it. Also, if we are deprecating services and removing them, we know who is using these APIs and they can be contacted in advance.

Another important point is that when a new application wants to use an API, it can provide the necessary information such as the number of transactions. With this knowledge, the provider can adapt accordingly and it will be possible to add it.

Using the product has provided us with a structured API management program. Because we have governance and knowledge about all of the APIs, we have a better overview. Knowing who is using an API, or who is going to use it, means that it is easier to introduce new things.

This solution has given us a competitive advantage because we have better automation and insight. Without it, a lot of automation would not be possible, and doing it manually would take more time.

More generally, this API gateway has improved the way our organization functions because it allows us to enable more partner integrations. Until now, most of our business-to-business integrations were going over EDI. With API instead, it will allow us to onboard other partners. The reason for this is that EDI is a very heavy format, which is very expensive. As a retail company, EDI is affordable when you have a large vendor. But sometimes we have smaller vendors, and if we force them to use EDI, it will sometimes block the ability to sell products to us because they can't afford the complete functionality of sending invoices or receiving orders.

What we are now doing with API management is to make the order and invoicing systems available via API. These smaller vendors can then use these APIs to send an invoice or to receive an order.

The two most important features are the lifecycle and the protection of your APIs.

On the topic of protecting your APIs, every API management solution has that, which is the core business. Without it, you don't have an API gateway and it's the basic setup that every API management solution needs. Of course, protecting your APIs is very important.

With respect to the lifecycle, it is helpful because, in our business, we find it important to have an overview of all of our APIs and to guide our different roles, including architects and solution developers, in the necessary work for delivering a web service. Depending on the type of service, we also want to govern the quality. We don't do it for all APIs but for some categories, we find it very important that the quality is at a high level. This means that we want to govern that and review it.

In these aspects, this solution helps us.

In relation to the lifecycle features, the user interface and the performance can be improved. It is not the quickest application and the user interface is not the most up-to-date. It's a tool that has existed for quite some time, and there haven't been a lot of improvements.

With respect to the API gateway, the runtime component, and the stability after a new release is something that can be improved.

I have been working with the webMethods API Gateway for approximately five years.

Once the system is set up and configured properly, it's stable. We don't have outages and it runs very well.

There are two ways to scale this product, and both of them are easy to do. The first is to add another server to your cluster, and the second way is to add more CPU power.

I would rate the technical support medium-high. It is comparable with other companies; not worse, but not especially better.

In general, I am happy with the support but my complaints are about the timing. Specifically, if your issue can be handled by the first line then you get feedback quickly. However, if the issue is complex then it needs to go to R&D and it takes time. This is the same experience that I have with other companies.

Positive

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

The installation and initial setup are complex. It is not possible to just keep clicking the Next button during the setup. You need to configure the system such that it works best for your environment. You should plan for deployment over three to six months, at least.

My advice is to involve a consultant from Software AG to help you with the setup. Of course, this is an on-premises situation. In the cloud, I don't know how easy or difficult it is.

We have seen ROI from this product and we are able to determine this because of our internal accounting. When a project starts, we always calculate what our benefits are with respect to the technology. Taking into account the number of web services and APIs that we have, we're pretty sure that considering the cost of governance, this solution is better than if we were not using one.

This is not a cheap solution but, compared to other products such as those offered by IBM, the pricing is similar.

We did evaluate other options including IBM API Connect and Apigee. Feature-wise, these products are comparable.

Given that we were already using webMethods, using the API gateway had some benefits. There is value in staying with a single vendor, with the advantage that it is easier to integrate with other products in the webMethods stack.

We did not consider using any open-source alternatives.

This solution provides a fully customizable portal that has built-in testing capabilities, although we haven't implemented it yet. This is something that we are planning to do within the next couple of months.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to involve consultants who are familiar with it because they can help you to best set it up. Also, think about the process and steps in your governance because this is a workflow and you want to be sure that it follows the procedures that you have in place.

Overall, I'm happy with the product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The tool helps us to streamline data integration. Its BPM is very strong and powerful. The solution helps us manage digital transformation. 

webMethods.io needs to incorporate ChatGPT to enhance user experience. It can offer a customized user experience. 

I have been working with the product for ten years. 

The solution is stable.

webMethods.io is scalable. 

webMethods.io's technical support is amazing. They have different mediums for communication, such as chatbots, emails, and phones. The response is based on the incident severity. They respond in a day even if the incident is of low severity. 

Positive

I have used IBM Message Broker and Apache. The product is much easier, and you do not need to have extensive knowledge. 

webMethods.io's deployment is not difficult and can be completed in a few hours. 

The tool is worth its money. 

webMethods.io is expensive. We have multiple components, and you need to pay for each of them. 

The product incorporates different layers of security, ranging from denial-of-service protection to IP denial and other features aimed at enhancing security. Given the importance of safeguarding information from exposure and unauthorized access, maintaining strong security measures is our key priority.

The solution focuses on low-code and zero-code approaches. This means users don't need extensive technical expertise. Instead, they can use drag-and-drop functionality.  I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for application-to-application integration and B2B integration.

The synchronous and asynchronous messaging system the solution provides is very good.

Other products have been using AI and cloud enhancements, but webMethods Integration Server is still lagging in that key area. It's very good as a standalone integration server, but it has to come up with more features in the cloud.

The solution's API management is slightly lagging, and its API policies could be improved.

I have been using webMethods Integration Server for 13 years.

I rate the solution a six out of ten for stability.

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

The solution's initial setup is easy for an experienced person, but a new person may find it difficult to set up everything. There are too many features and components. The setup could be easier if the solution could merge everything in one suit.

The solution’s pricing is too high.

The solution has impacted our system's scalability and ability because it is quite good and pretty fast.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.