webMethods.io Reviews

We use it for everything. Three years or four years ago our company was bought. In our original company we used it for EDI, although that has pretty much gone away since the purchase. We do use it for EDI, but we use it for more free EAI, enterprise application integration. It allows us to have plant software talk to SAP. It allows us to interface with external parties through their MFT (managed file transfer) product called Active Transfer. We use it to connect all kinds of systems.

Also, in a company that's big, there are always acquisitions, and before the acquisition can be fully integrated there is always the challenge of getting data in and out of that acquisition. We use webMethods for that too, because we can either use internal network or external network.

It's hosted in Azure, on VMs.

Its adapters and connectors absolutely provide the fastest way to build an integration. An example of the effect of that speed of integration on our business is that when our company was acquired, the acquiring company didn't have webMethods and wasn't interested in it. We were able to build interfaces quickly and show that they didn't need constant babysitting. For example, you can build frameworks. We had built an error-handling framework that can notify people with meaningful error messages when they happen. It never crashes. It always tells people what happened. We were able to build solutions much faster than with the other tools.

Process orchestration is another benefit. Driving towards an event-driven architecture, and not a batch-oriented architecture—which introduces all kinds of time delays and doesn't give a true picture of the end-to-end process—we've used webMethods Designer to design process models that can orchestrate a process from beginning to end. For example, we can get data via SFTP, trigger an event in webMethods to process the data, and load it into a third-party data warehouse database such as Snowflake, which is a new up-and-comer. We can then trigger other processes to move that data and process it in Snowflake. We get responses back and, at the end, we can consume the processed data and send it to a different endpoint. All of that is orchestrated by webMethods. Process orchestration is a very strong point of the solution.

Modifying and troubleshooting are very easy. They have a nice debugging app interface. It's faster than anything else that we've ever used. For example, when we were acquired, we had to keep our legacy SAP system, which was still functioning for the legacy company, synchronized with the acquiring company's SAP system. This was a very complicated task and we were able to do it very quickly using webMethods Integration Server.

We use Active Transfer quite a bit. It's very convenient because it is integrated with Integration Server. That means you can deploy an event-driven architecture, based on SFTP, which most people can't pull off. Most of the time, with SFTP, there is file polling and it's not an event-driven architecture. But webMethods' solution allows you to plug into their integration server and have a totally end-to-end event-driven architecture.

The comprehensiveness and depth of Integration Servers' connectors to packaged apps and custom apps is unlimited. They have a connector for everything. If they don't, you can build it yourself. Or oftentimes, if there is value for other customers as well, you can talk with webMethods about creating a new adapter for you. That's particularly true of their cloud-based webMethods.io and their hybrid cloud solution. It's an on-prem plugin called CloudStreams. That allows you to connect your on-prem services with cloud-based things. The number-one example that everyone always gets is Salesforce.

That depth of comprehensiveness is similarly true for the solution’s connectors to SaaS apps, IoT devices, and legacy applications. That is the number-one strong point of webMethods. It can connect to anything. There are so many out-of-the-box connectors for SaaS things. There are JDBC adapters, SAP adapters. They have pretty much unlimited connectivity, or you can build it through their toolkits.

It provides a single hybrid-integration platform for all our needs.

Deploying is something we have found to be lacking with native webMethods tools, as is the ability to plug into a change management system, so we built our own deployment system. But again, we built it with webMethods' foundation tools and then interfaced with sub-version, version control, and our own home-built change management system. We used it to enforce that things can't go to prod unless they pass the QA stage and have had successful QA acceptance testing.

It would be nice if they had a change management system offering. We built our own deployer application because the one built into webMethods couldn't enforce change management rules. Integration into a change management system, along with the version control system, would be a good offering; it's something that they're lacking.

I've been using webMethods Integration Server for 20 years.

Overall, it's very incredibly stable. I've never seen any other software platform that can run for so long without crashing. We've had servers run for over a year, and we have restarted them not because they were broken but because we were installing something. We've had servers run for over a year.

In terms of support for the solution’s adapters and connectors and long-term stability for your services or integrations, you build once and forget it. 

Scalability is another strong point. It's very scalable. It's very easy to stand up parallel machines, and add them to a cluster. We have two machine clusters because another strong point is that we've built everything in high-availability. We have two of everything; everything is clustered. But if we all of a sudden acquired 50 more companies, and had all kinds of additional business, we would just stand up a couple of more servers in the cluster, they would inherit the same exact code, and it would be simple very simple to scale.

It's used for all our North America integrations. It runs the gamut of a little bit of EDI, a lot of EAI, and some MFT. Anything where one system needs to talk to another system, and trade data, we use WebMethods for that.

We are always building new things in it. There are always new projects. 

We don't need a lot of vendor support. You get the platform and you get some people that know how to use it and you really don't need much support from the vendor. However, when we do need support, they do have a good support portal and we do get support from their personnel pretty quickly. Our experience with their support has been good, for the most part. Once in a while we get people who aren't quite as good. I would rate it at eight out of 10.

We did not have a previous solution.

When it comes to upgrades, 20 years ago, it was very hard. Ten years ago, it was hard. Today, it's fairly straightforward. They've gotten much better at their upgrades.

As for how long an upgrade takes, there are many factors involved. We had a struggle with our infrastructure team just getting us the vanilla boxes and Azure. Once you have your boxes in a network so that they can talk to each other, the installation of WebMethods is fairly simple. 

Then there comes the complexity of importing your old code into it. And the hardest task of all is testing everything to make sure it still works. But the upgrades are pretty simple, they have apps that help out with that, and they work pretty well.

The upgrade we're doing right now has four people involved. I am the architect, and the other roles are developer/testers.

Day-to-day maintenance is almost zero. If there is a need for some maintenance, we have two people, me and another, who take care of system maintenance. But really, it's stand-it-up-and-forget-it. You do have to do certain things. webMethods is not in charge of your user databases. So if they fill up with data, and you haven't built in something to automatically purge them every so often, that's on you, not on webMethods. But as long as you have built in these types of maintenance routines, and schedule them, everything is pretty trouble-free.

I wish our company measured ROI. We're slowly getting there. 

But webMethods Integration Server just saves time, especially development time. We can implement solutions that save repetitive user-time, often. Often, if a group comes to us and says, "Fred is spending two hours a day doing this stupid task where he's just uploading into a spreadsheet, and downloading here; can you help?" We can turn that type of thing around so fast, and eliminate Fred's two hours per day.

Pricing is the number-one downfall. It's too expensive. They could make more money by dropping the price in half and getting more customers. It's the best product there is, but it's too expensive. It could be 10 out of 10 if they dropped the price. There are so many people who don't use it because it's so expensive.

It also provides application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, APIs, and microservices. That range of features is very important because we can do anything with it. We tried Informatica, for example, which was portrayed as being an equal, and it wasn't. It can't do everything and then you have to go out to other products and combine them. webMethods can truly do everything within the webMethods environment. And you don't have to buy add-on products. In reality, a lot of the webMethods' plugins are add-on products that were acquired at some point. But they do pretty well when it comes to integrating their acquisitions into the main ecosystem.

The scope of abilities in Informatica is very limited. The scope of abilities for webMethods is pretty much unlimited.

We have also looked at SnapLogic, and again, it just doesn't have the breadth of abilities that webMethods does.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using it is to never build a one-off. Always think "reusability." Everything in webMethods is reusable. Even if you think you will never use it again, and you build it hastily, without error-handling, you will get burned. Always build for reusability.

You should definitely build a couple of little reusable frameworks too. The first reusable framework I would build would be an error-handling framework. Once you build that, you add those service calls to every service you ever build. In that way, once things error, you always know. It knows how to send an email to the right people, it knows how to send a meaningful error message that someone can read and see what happened. Building a meaningful error-handling framework upfront will save you so much time when things break and people ask "How do we fix it?" It will also proactively let people know things errored out, instead of reactively. We also built a deployment framework. That's a little above and beyond. The webMethods' tools are not terrible in that regard, it just doesn't talk to a change management system.

Everything you build in webMethods is a microservice. It's been that way for 20 years. So even though the term wasn't coined back then, you can expose any service in webMethods to any other system you choose. Call it an API, call it a microservice, but it's all just built-in and it's already there.

They are focusing on their cloud offerings, as is everybody else, because everyone wants to go that way. Sometimes it's just for the sake of saying, "I have a cloud offering," but theirs seems to be pretty solid. Their cloud offering is webMethods.io. However, I haven't used that extensively. That'll be coming up this year. There is also a hybrid thing called CloudStreams and that is for on-prem webMethods, which is what we have, but it has canned connectors to SaaS solutions like Salesforce, whereas webMethods.io is entirely in the cloud. You would use that to connect one SaaS to another SaaS.

In terms of the solution's support for the latest standards making it possible to plug into modern tooling and third-party products, we've found no need. It's a pretty complete solution, unlike other solutions. And you really don't need to plug anything else into it.

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.

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.

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. 

We use the solution in the API gateway services. 

I like the tool's scalability. 

webMethods.io Integration's installation is complex. It should also improve integration and connectors. 

I have been working with the solution for more than ten years. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

I have used Apigee before webMethods.io Integration. 

The installation took about four to six weeks to complete. You don't need a big team to handle the deployment. We relied on one system architect to handle it. The tool's maintenance is also not difficult. 

webMethods.io Integration's pricing is high and has yearly subscription costs.  

This solution suits enterprises and I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for logistic purposes.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with various servers.

The solution could be more user-friendly. They should include proper documentation for easy understanding.

We have ten solution users in our company. It has good scalability. We plan to increase its usage.

The solution's customer service is good. We have support access. Thus, we write to them for the service request in case of any issues.

The complexity of the solution's initial setup process depends on the environment and specific project requirements.

We purchase a yearly basis license for the solution. I rate its pricing an eight. It is not that expensive. The price depends on the use cases, support, and resources for implementation.

It is a good solution. Also, it is easy to use compared to other integration solutions like Azure, SAP, etc. It has the highest resolution and is more secure as well. I rate it a nine.

The primary use case of the solution is for our digital sale tool.

I really appreciate the form and application that indicate the API. 

The performance is good.

I would like the solution to provide bi-weekly updates.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

The solution is sustainable and stable.

The solution is on the cloud therefore it is scalable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend the solution to others.

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.