webMethods.io Reviews

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

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

• API development
• Traditional ESB development
• B2B development.

• DevOps support
• Java services debugging.

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

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

The Integration Server

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

Universal Messaging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ease of use.

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

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

It seems to be doing very well.

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

We did not use another solution previously.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We enlisted help from the reseller with the initial setup.

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

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

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Features
• Support.

Used for intra-company application-to-application integration and for intercompany B2B integration (order to cash, procure payment, HR, and banking functions).

WM is an enterprise bus which is used for all integrations, bringing all message transfers into one application, and making monitoring and integration of applications easy.

The main assets are its 

• flow language
• debugging
• Broker. 

Flow language is far better and more flexible for debugging.

• Broker
• Trading partners
• Portal

webMethods, in my current client's environment, is used to provide solutions based on SOA (web services) and BPM (Business Process Management).

The MFT component of webMethods, for example, is easy to set up and convenient to use. It handles files very efficiently and it is easy to automate tasks with complex schedules. Monitoring is centralized to MWS which can be used to monitor other products as well (Trading Networks, BPM, MFT, etc.)

• SOA
• BPM
• Trading Networks (B2B)
• Active transfer (MFT)

Documentation needs tuning. There is a lot of dependency with SoftwareAG. Even with the documentation at hand, you can struggle to implement scenarios without SAG’s help. By contrast, IBM’s documentation is self-explanatory, in my opinion.

This is a middleware tool from Software AG, so when there is a need for EAI/ESB, or B2B; the use cases and implementations are plenty and can vary according to business and enterprise architecture.

For example, an internal application like SAP sends data which is received and transformed by webMethods to EDI, XML, or another user-requested format, and sent to an external business partner (via jms/FTP/WS call).

One to many, or many to one transformation and delivery is the simplest example.

• Integration
• Transformation
• Easy development
• Connectivity and adapters
• The variety of tools that are part of the webMethods product suite

Licensing is an issue since all products do not have central licensing. UM has a different license, IS has a different license, etc. This differs from client to client. 

The primary use of the webMethods platform is to communicate with multiple applications and integrate them. webMethods provides business process integration, B2B partner integration, and also uses Web services to connect software applications. My client acquired another company and we are integrating the partners of the acquired company with their clients, using various data communication standards like EDI, EDIFACT, and Rosettanet messages. 

In my previous project we used it to bridge communications between a front-end application and the back-end, connecting them with Web services through SOAP requests and SOAP responses, using JMS queues and broker.

When my organization wanted to migrate the front-end applications from a Genesys framework to .NET for various security reasons, webMethods was used for ESB integration. At the time of migration, there was no work being done on the ESB side, which reduced developers' efforts and all the services were re-used as we used Web services to connect the front-end with mainframes.

When my business client  acquired another business and we were integrating the services, as B2B uses standard communication messages, i.e. EDI, the work made the developers' task simpler, in handling all the interfaces.

All of the following three features provided by webMethods are valuable:

1. Application integration
2. Business process integration
3. B2B partner integration

But among these, I feel B2B partner integration is the most valuable. This module integrates two business partners and exchanges data through electronic data interchange messages in the form of specific standards, without any manual process needed.

When migration happens from the one release to an upgraded release from Software AG, many of the existing services are deprecated and developers have to put in effort testing and redeveloping some of the services. It would be better that upgrade releases took care to support the lower-level versions of webMethods.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate this product an eight. I feel comfortable using this product with its ease of building interfaces for developers. This is a better integration tool for integrating with various applications like Oracle, Salesforce, mainframes, etc. It works fine in the integration of legacy software as well.

I have been using this solution for two years and four months and I haven't had any difficulty using it for building the interfaces and connecting various business processes, once I had acquired basic knowledge of the solution.

webMethods is primarily used to integrate applications. While one can always do the same by building APIs (Java, .NET, etc.), webMethods provides a robust, scalable, and easy to manage platform to do so.

The need is primarily felt when integrating multiple application for a large enterprise. To list a few, one can use webMethods to integrate web-based, file-based, database-based applications. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It has multiple modules for specific integration types, like a Trading Networks module for business to business integrations, business process models for graphical representations for executing business processes. One can also build small Web-based application using CAF and DSP.

Given that you have one integration API in place, it takes very minimal effort to scale it to any other application that might want to use the same. Its flow-based development environment is a breeze and makes it really easy to re-use most of the existing components and build up a new API.

The second most important aspect is managing the components. It’s fairly easy to view, move, and mange access across different components. Different component types are categorized and can be viewed in a web based administration console.

I would say the core Web-based integrations work the best with webMethods. They are the most efficient and robust implementations one can do with webMethods. There have always been some ups and downs in its specialized modules, but I have found its core integration platform the most reliable.

The stability of the various modules of the product suite have been a bit of a concern lately. Though their support team is always easy to reach out to, I would prefer it not come to that.