webMethods.io Reviews

We primarily use it as an integration server. We have integration use cases, including B2B, et cetera.

It is reliable and works very well. 

The integration with platforms is great.

It's straightforward to set up. 

Technical support has been responsive when we need assistance.

It is a very stable product.

The solution can scale as required. 

We're fine with the product offering.

It is quite expensive. 

I've used the solution for more than a decade. 

The solution is very stable. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is highly scalable, to my knowledge. The organization has used it for almost two decades without issue. I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten. 

We have about 100 users on the solution. 

We do not have plans to increase the number of users, to my knowledge.

We've used technical support, and they have been fine. They are very responsive. 

Positive

I had used other products previously. I use this solution since it has a lot of use cases, and the organization chooses to use the product. 

It's easy to deploy. It has its own deployment tool, which makes it very fast. We can use it both on the cloud and on-premises. 

We have a 13 to 17-member team of developers that can handle the deployment. 

We handle the initial setup in-house according to the government model. Our IT team handles the process. 

I can't comment on the exact ROI; however, it is a very useful product.

The solution has a yearly licensing fee. It is very costly.

I'm not sure if there are any extra costs involved in using the solution. 

I'd recommend the solution to others, depending on the use case. There are many factors that would be highly dependent on its success. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

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.

Our primary use case for webMethods Integration Server is for our internal application integration. We use it to expose REST and SOAP web services and to connect it with SAP.

We also use it as a bridge to transform web service calls. We'll use an ESB if we want to transform the protocol or the message. It's also used to connect our internal custom-written Java applications with products like SAP, which don't have an open standards interface.

We only use it on-premise. We are considering going to a hybrid setup but at the moment, we don't have it yet. Nevertheless, we still use the Integration Server to integrate our cloud applications. We only have cloud on-premise integrations and not cloud-to-cloud. That is also why we're not focusing on a hybrid setup.

Integration Server does our business-to-business integrations. It does all of our EDI integrations of passing over our Integration Server and our LAN connects to our internal applications.

Its adapters and connectors provide the fastest way to build an integration. We don't need to create our own implementations because we can use the adapters. We can immediately connect to the backend systems without creating a lot of our own custom code by using these adapters.

The vendor's full support for Integration Server's adapters and connectors brings long-term stability to our services because if something changes to the backend application, we don't need to bother with it. Software AG just adapts the adapter and we get a new version. It's much easier working this way.

Deploying a new application is rather easy. You need a deployer and to build a system. We have built something around it to add it to our continuous integration pipeline, but we have the necessary tools to test our production environments.

We use the same system to modify or redeploy these integrations. If we have a bug we'll adapt our codes and deploy a new version. The code changes need the most time. If it's a small code change, then it goes very quickly. If it's an important bug, it'll take more time. The deployment and build don't take a lot of time.

It's a visual tool, so our transformations can be quickly implemented without a lot of fuss. The fact that we have an easy way to expose REST services is also very interesting. It offers the possibility to connect over GMS to synchronize message brokers.

Using an adapter is quite easy. For example, the SAP adapter works very well, and connecting to custom applications is very easy.

We would use MQTT when we need to connect to IoT devices. For the other legacy apps, in most cases, we use the adapters. Acquiring an adapter is quite easy.

Integration Server provides us with application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, APIs, and microservices. Internally we don't use it for data integration, but it is possible. We don't work with microservices but I know that it's also possible.

It is important to us that Integration Server offers us a broad range of features like application, data integration, and API. It's important to have that kind of broad setup because it's a service burst. It's in the middle of a lot of integrations. It has to be able to have a lot of features

In terms of improvement, it would be better if it adapted quicker to open standards. It took a while for API specification before the last version was available. The spec of version two was rather quick. 

With an integration platform, it sometimes needs to happen faster because you sometimes have clients or providers that already use new specifications.

I have been using webMethods Integration Server since 2011. 

I am very satisfied with stability. It's very stable, we haven't had any issues at all.

We had a lot of issues with our other solution but none with Integration Server.

There are many scalability options, it is possible to add core CPUs to your server or you can add additional servers. Both are possible, both are not complex. The only thing that you need to take into account is then the licensing, but there are no technical issues for scalability.

Technical support is okay. It's comparable with other companies. It of course depends on the kind of issue that you have, but I'm rather satisfied with their support.

We were using IBM before webMethods. We used a combination of the two. When we started we had both webMethods Integration Server only for B2B. We used WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus for internal application integration. It's easier to have only one. That is the reason that we chose one of both. The second reason was also that IBM was deprecating their product and asking to switch to another one. Instead of going through IBM, we figured we could do everything with webMethods which is why we completely switched over.

webMethods had a very good overview of all transactions. That was the main reason we went with them.

The initial setup was of medium complexity. It's new so you need to learn it. A tool like this is never easy. webMethods Integration Server was easier than a different solution that we were using. But it's not a walk in the park. You need to spend time on it. There are configuration settings that can't be avoided. It's a complex feature set. We have had more complex systems also in our landscape. It's not just "click, click, click, done."

I was not involved in the initial deployment. But I know that they upgraded to webMethods Integration Server in a month. It took a few months to learn everything in the system.

We worked with a consultant for the deployment. We worked with a consultant from Software AG which went well. We have also worked with other consultants from consultancy companies that were not directly linked to Software AG but work with a lot of Software AG products. They helped us to set up our webMethods products.

I don't think webMethods is the cheapest but I think the quality is worth it. But it's not cheap.

We're satisfied with our choice and the price is not a reason to look for something else.

It's wise to work with a consultant when you introduce Integration Server because you need to learn about the product. It's better to have advice from someone who already has experience with it.

I would rate webMethods Integration Server an eight out of ten. I'm quite happy and satisfied with it but nothing is perfect.

One of the most important features is that it gives you the possibility to do low-level integration. It provides a lot of features out of the box, and over the years, it has matured so much that any problem that is there in the market can be solved with this product. We can meet any requirements through customizations, transformations, or the logic that needs to be put in. Some of the other products struggle in this aspect. They cannot do things in a certain way, or they have a product limitation, whereas, with webMethods, I have never faced this kind of problem. When clients come to me with any problem, in about 99% of cases, I say, "Yes, it is feasible to do through webMethods." It has reached such a level of flexibility and maturity. Most of the things are available out of the box, and even if something is not available out of the box, we can customize it and deliver it for a client's requirements.

Version control is not very easy. The packages and the integration server are on Eclipse IDE, but you can't compare the code from the IDE. For example, if you are working on Java code, doing version control and deployment for a quick comparison between the code isn't easy. Some tools or plug-ins are there, such as CrossVista, and you can also play with an SVN server where you have to place your package, and from there, you can check, but you have to do that as a separate exercise. You can't do it from the IDE or webMethods server. You can't just right-click and upload your service. CrossVista came up with a solution, which was with the upgraded version of webMethods, but even that was lagging. CrossVista was a bit delayed in coping with the new versions of webMethods. Many times, we get into a situation where we want to know who made a change, when it was made, and how it was before the change. When something that was working well previously suddenly stops working, we want to go back and see who made that change, but because of these version control restrictions, we have to take a longer path. We have to go to the version control system. There is no direct feature in webMethods for that.

There should be more visibility. Currently, Software AG has multiple tools. They have webMethods, and then they have Terracotta as a different product. They have an API governance tool as a different product. They also have Trading Networks. Some of the tools have a very good UI, and some of them don't. For example, earlier, there was a message broker, and you were able to visualize what is happening to a document on the server. You could plug in a broker and see everything. You could see the number of documents that are there on a broker. You could see different queues and topics created. They then moved to Universal Messaging, which is a nirvana-based universal messaging solution. Now, the plug-in is gone, and from the MWS server, you cannot see what is happening in UM. A different view is created for that in Enterprise Manager, which is a desktop UI application. It is not a browser-based application. So, sometimes to monitor different tools, you have to go to different screens. Everything can't be monitored centrally. If you have MWS, not everything is on MWS. Command Central is a different screen altogether. There should be a centralized UI on which every component can be plugged in so that it's easy to control, view, and monitor everything. That's what I really want to have. The Universal Messaging Enterprise Manager is especially very difficult. Sometimes, it takes time to launch on your desktop. It is basically a desktop application, and you need to have a powerful laptop or hardware to launch it. They should make it a browser-based solution.

Their support could also be improved. They could be more responsive and quicker.

I have been working with this solution for almost 12 years.

Its stability is very high. It is very stable, and I've never seen it crash. In my 12 years of career, there have been hardly one or two instances where there was an issue, but that was also because of some issue in the development where we had memory leakage.

Its scalability is good, but you have to plan it in advance. When you are designing your overall infrastructure architecture and delivery framework, you need to put scalability at the core of it. Once your infrastructure is set up, it's not very easy to scale it up or down.

Most of the time, admins interact with the support because they handle day-to-day installations or upgrades. I have had some experience with them. I don't have much experience. I hardly had one or two instances where I had to interact with them. It was not very smooth. It was okay. I ultimately managed to get support, but it was not very straightforward. The ticket lingers on for two days or three days, and there are multiple reassignments before it reaches the right party. Based on the little experience I have had, I would rate them a three out of five.

I have not got a chance to work a lot with other vendors. The first ESB I used was OpenESB, which is Glassfish-based. It was ultimately owned by Oracle when they acquired Sun. I used it back then. I also got a chance to work a bit on microservices and Apigee. Microservices are based on Spring Boot. So, it is a Java product. Apigee is an API governance tool. It is now a Google product. 

Apigee is a very good tool for API management, but a lot of scripting and coding skills are required. You need to be a genuine coder, and you should have an understanding of JavaScript, Python, or whatever else you are using to work with Apigee, whereas with webMethods API governance, even if you're working as a developer or designer for the integration server, you just need to know the basic concepts of programming. You do not need to know .NET, Java, etc. You just need to know about the integration. You should know how a web service works, how an API works, and how SFTP works. The tool itself is based on Java. It also uses Eclipse IDE. It has similarities with Java. If you feel that something is not achievable through what is provided out of the box or you want to do it in a slightly different or optimized way for your requirement, it gives you an option to write a Java service. There is an option to write Java code, but as the product is becoming mature, the requirement for a Java service is becoming very less. The product is evolving based on the learning of the user experience. It is evolving based on the problem statements and the scenarios where the product was not giving sufficient solutions. They kept including any missing functionalities in the new versions. That's why now the requirement to write a Java service is minimal. In a team of 100, if you have two Java resources, that is more than enough.

It depends on what role you are playing. Are you working as a developer or are you working as an admin? For a developer, it's very simple. It's not very complex. You just need an Eclipse-based designer IDE and a browser installed on your machine. That's all. You are all set. However, as an admin, you have to install and maintain all the components. You have to install the patches, and updating these versions is not very smooth. The update manager that they have provided is not very accurate. Sometimes, it fails. If it fails in between, it is very difficult to recover from that failure. So, from an admin's point of view, it is a bit difficult, but from a developer's point of view, there is nothing much.

We generally have webMethods Integration Server on-prem. We are deploying it on-prem, and there is a deployer, and there is also a webMethods IO component, which is more cloud-based. The VM on which it is installed could be hosted somewhere on the cloud, which is a different story, but the product itself doesn't have any cloud capability where you can directly put it on a cloud provider host.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We are using it to orchestrate and configure our APIs.

I believe we are using its latest version.

We needed a tool that was able to orchestrate and help us configure our APIs so that we could maintain and see the heartbeat, traffic, trends, etc.

A while ago, they were hacked, and it took them a very long time to open their website again in order to download any service packs or any features. I don't know what they could do differently. I know that they were vulnerable, and there was some downtime, but because they were down, we were unable to download any potential service packs.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 in terms of stability and scalability.

We used Dollar Universe or Dollar U. It was more for batch scheduling. We didn't have anything for maintaining, configuring, or hosting our APIs. It was more of a manual process before that.

It is a little complex, but we're okay with that. MuleSoft is obviously the Cadillac and the best of the best, but we just didn't want to pay that sort of price for what MuleSoft can do.

We partnered with our implementation partner to do the install for us. 

Its maintenance is more of a shifting of duties. There are no new FTEs for it. It is just a shifting of duties.

I signed a three-year deal with them. It is a yearly locked-in price for the next three years.

I was the architect of it, and I wasn't personally the one who went deep into it. My advice would be to just partner with an implementation team and make sure that things are documented so that for upgrades, you're not married to them, and you don't have to use them all the time.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

By linking apps and services, the webMethods Integration Server allows you to automate processes.

I like the stability of the webMethods Integration Server.

I would like to see the price improve.

I have been working with webMethods Integration Server for eight years.

We are currently using version 10. x.

webMethods Integration Server is quite stable, especially given the amount of load it has been handling.

webMethods Integration Server is a scalable solution.

In general, I contact technical support if we are experiencing any problems. They are extremely helpful.

Previously, I had not used another solution.

The installation is straightforward. It's easy.

It can take thirty minutes to deploy depending on the number of components.

It can be installed both on-premises and in the cloud. It has been migrated to the cloud, and we also use it on-premise.

You can complete the installation yourself.

I would like to see better pricing for the license.

We are researching cloud-based solutions, such as AWS and MuleSoft.

I am a user, so I'm not entirely familiar with everything this solution has to offer. I am utilizing one of the technologies that they provide.

Using this solution is dependant upon each area's perspective. I can't exactly say, if you had only one user that it's only for this solution or that solution, but it actually depends upon each other's perspectives.

WebMethods is the recommended solution if you want a stable integration, an ESB platform, and a B2B.

I am unfamiliar with cloud-based solutions or their environment. We are exploring their options and services.

I would rate webMethods Integration Server a nine out of ten.

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.

We have an open banking initiative in Indonesia. We are mandated by a regulator's bank in Indonesia to open up our services to other institutions, not only banks, but also financial technology (FinTech) companies and startups as well as eCommerce or other industries.
Thereby, they can consume banking services through an API, such as our funds transfers, mobile banking services, or a bill payment, like electricity, water bills, college, and so on, through an API to their applications. It is not obligatory that you need to download our mobile banking in order to do these transactions, but you can do the transaction using other applications, such as the FinTech or eCommerce application that the customer currently has. Those use cases, for the open banking readiness for Indonesia, utilize webMethods API Gateway and standardized services of API for fund transfer, debit credit transfer, bill payments, and opening up a savings account using online applications. Those are pretty much the use cases for webMethods API Gateway in order for us to connect it with FinTech startups, eCommerce, and other institutions who would like to consume banking transactions through Mandiri.

Since we are a very highly regulated industry, which is a bank in Indonesia, we are not allowed to host any financial transaction outside of the Indonesian region. So, the solution must be deployed on-premise inside of our data center.

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. (Read my webMethods Integration Server review here.) There is also webMethods API Gateway and Software AG Apama. 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.

Within the new version, webMethods API Gateway gives us an end-to-end lifecycle from the creation of the API up into the development, deployment, and promotion into production/live. The current end-to-end lifecycle of the API gives us enough authority and governance of the API. We know what are currently live services, what is in the testing stage of development, and what version that has been commissioned. So, the full life cycle itself gives us full authority and governance of the API.

You can carefully select what services can be consumed by the outside and what services can only be consumed internally. Also, you can see what the fallback scenario is, if some services are customized and what is the impact analysis, e.g., what is the impact to other services that depends on certain services that we are currently automizing. These are very critical capabilities for API implementation in any organization. You do need to have good API governance for it, not only tools, but also all the procedurals. You will need all the standard operating procedures for starting a development of API up to deployment into production.

webMethods API Gateway provides an engagement platform for managing hackathons. Our last hackathon was in 2019. We developed several services in the cloud using a sandbox environment, so it does not connect with our real life production environment. We created some accumulated transaction behavior, so hackathon developers could connect it with our box services within the sandbox environments. It does provide good freedom to host competition in an isolated environment.

At Mandiri, we divided webMethods API Gateway into two layers, the external API gateway and the internal API gateway. The external API gateway is for Mandiri channels and our core partner channel for feedback, eCommerce, and other institutions. With their channel, they like to connect and consume services. webMethods API Gateway gives you a sense of security and quite adequate minimum security to secure services, e.g., DDoS attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and queries for SQL injection. These are already built inside of webMethods API Gateway. 

It has a good role definition and scope for its services. Expected channels can only access what type of services, and we can define those as per our contract with prospective partners. So, it boils down to the architecture: How do you like to architect the integration and partnering with other institutions? It depends on that. However, the system itself gives you that flexibility.

webMethods API Gateway gives us a set of rules and good security for securing outside work to connect with our services. It has good minimum security measurements built-in. However, webMethods API Gateway itself has very minimum API governance. You need to have a central site in place to have full-fledged governance, which is one of their modules.

The solution provides a fully customizable portal that has built-in testing and collaboration capabilities. Because it is similar with other well-known products in the market, the process doesn't have specific requirements. We do have a good adoption rate. We only have two weeks of learning and customizing the behavior to developers. By the third week, every developer can actually develop by themselves.

Previously, we had some difficulties with end-to-end lifecycle management of APIs because the product was not yet mature enough. Two years ago, it was not yet mature in terms of the capabilities, which were still separated and not yet consolidated. There were several modules of webMethods API Gateway which needed to be consolidated into one webMethods API Gateway. Previously, they had two separate modules for API management as well as others. 

One of the improvements that need to be added into future releases is the ability to support other third-party monitoring tools. I know that they already support Jenkins, but in Mandiri. We use Bamboo for the deployment as well as part of Jenkins. We also install other monitoring tools, such as AppDynamics, for collecting information on performance and the problems of API Gateway hosting services. 

With performance, there is room for improvement in regards to if we would like to put another extra layer of security on it, such as SSL. This is affecting their performance quite significantly. They need to improve the process of managing the SSL and other things inside their solutions, so there will not be quite such a significant impact to the performance.

With their API-Portal, you need to have flexibility when changing the layout and teams, giving more flexibility to rearrange and do some type of UX/UI that fits into your organization. The API-Portal that comes from Software AG has some of those limitations, with only certain parts that can be fully customized.

We have used it for almost three years, since 2017.

How do you get money from selling or offering your financial services to the other partners or institutions? It comes down to monetization. How do you monitor usage of certain particular protection or usage of services? I do see a lack of capabilities inside of the monetization area for them. They have a cloud infrastructure that is pay per use type of a thing. If you already use 1,000 transactions per se, then you can be charged and billed. I see room for improvement there for their side on that particular capability of the monetization.

We have evaluated other solutions, such as Apigee and MuleSoft, back in 2016. but since we already have Enterprise Service Bus that is using the integration server, which is collecting and managing all the integration services inside, we wanted to see the end-to-end picture of the service itself. It was very logical that you need to have end-to-end monitoring and trend deployment from the service deployment, up into exposing the external world using webMethods API Gateway. We see those advantages from using webMethods compared with other solutions, such as Apigee or MuleSoft, because of the continuation of the architecture. We would also like to expand those into our separating stacks.

In every implementation of webMethods API Gateway, I strongly suggest that you need good API governance. webMethods has their API governance all built inside of your license. It is a continuation between the services using the webMethods Integration Server and webMethods API Gateway, exposing those services into the outside world. You need to have good governance for that.

I would rate this solution an eight (out of 10).