In my experience with webMethods.io, the features or capabilities I have found most valuable include normal features such as caching, which is general and used in many applications such as Corba and TIBCO. Caching, data transformation, business rules, secure connectivity, and role-based rules are particularly beneficial.

I believe data transformation is exceptional in webMethods.io because they have an online database that can cache the database online. This is the most used benefit for the data transformation along with queuing, allowing quick file transfers in a very short period. This is the most important aspect to the client.

Secure connectivity in webMethods.io can be achieved by using SOAP and HTTPS, as you can use a secure protocol.

The secure protocol in webMethods.io is mandatory, as it protects all transactions and calls coming in or going out, especially when built with the methods API Gateway from companies such as IBM or Software AG. Both can secure the incoming connections to your network and provide flexibility to connect and integrate with all kinds of protocols and API gateways from other organizations.

My impression of webMethods.io's drag-and-drop interface to design workflows is actually amazing. It makes life easier for developers and end users who are using webMethods.io to change the rules and build any integration touchpoint from scratch without needing to write any single line of code—all done by dragging and dropping the components.

The tool is very good and useful. Especially in the government sector where I work as an IT Director at Public Authority for Civil Information, we have been using Software AG suite components including IRIS, webMethods, Terracotta, Trading Networks, and others. The product is powerful, straightforward, and easy to use. It facilitates the exposure of around 235 services through our platform to feed various government entities across the entire country.

The orchestration aspects of APIs, the integration capabilities, and the logging functionalities were the most critical features of our workflow.

The messaging part is the most valuable feature. 

The product supports various types of digital documents, including XMLs and EDI.

Nowadays, API is popular throughout the world, so the user needs to have a single point of control over an API. It should also have governance on top of it, and it should be possible to apply some security policies to it so that a user can have a mature product and a single point entry in terms of a gateway that can be helpful. Recently, webMethods has turned to an API-based approach, and API Gateway was webMethods' way of converting itself into an API-based tool.

Clients choose webMethods.io API for its intuitive interface, promoting seamless interaction and quick communication between systems. The platform's focus on rapid deployment expedites time-to-market, while robust governance features ensure control and compliance. Particularly appealing to less mature clients in API management, it offers a strategic toolset for gradual integration advancement, providing both immediate benefits and a pathway for long-term growth.

The core product can be used not only for automatic file transfers between applications, but also as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Internally, it's easy to exchange messages between applications because they have decent integrations of message protocols whether you're using a REST API or MQ. Thus, its core functionality is highly compatible with different methods of exchanging messages between applications.

On the whole, it's a very good product being all at once easy to use, easy enough to install, and easy to deploy new workflows and so on.

From a user perspective, the feature which I like the most about Integration Server is its designer. If you compare it with other open-source platforms like Spring Boot, even though it is lightweight and you can customize the way you want it, as a programmer if you look at it, the designer is the major feature. You can write your logic with basic knowledge of, for example, programming languages like Java. You have that palette feature where you can plug and play and write the logic that you want. That's the feature I like most about webMethods. 

It's customizable. You can write your own adapters. We have customer adapters built on protocols like PCP, Plain PCP sockets, as well. You can write your own adapters framework.

The solution is scalable.

The feature I found to be most beneficial or valuable for our company's workflows revolves around the area of the broker functionality provided by the product since it has reduced a lot of effort.

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. 

What I like the most about the solution is that it comes with ready-made tools like handling security tokens and OAuth. API Gateway does the hard work of keeping things secure and managing who can access what, making it easy and safe without lots of custom work.

webMethods API Portal is overall very valuable. It is now a comprehensive API catalogue that serves various purposes, including API assessment and evaluation. The monetization module is particularly robust. It is applied across different sectors, including the government, and is known for its strong performance.     

What I like best about webMethods Integration Server is its portfolio of connectors. Every integration product has different components to interact with SAP, Salesforce CRM, etc. My organization includes the type of connectors a product has, apart from license availability, usage, and so on, as the criteria for choosing or recommending a solution.

In terms of the feature set, any integration software you use will have to connect different components of enterprise software. Depending on the enterprise software a financial institution, such as a bank, will be using, my company first checks the available connectors in the product, product maturity, and what other solutions can be integrated with the product before making a recommendation to either reuse the product if you currently have a license for it, or purchase a license if you don't have the license yet.

For example, when an enterprise invests in SAP or Salesforce CRM software, that investment is very significant. When you need a form of interaction to exchange data, that's when you use an integration product, so I'm saying that the actual value of integration software, such as webMethods Integration Server, is its ability to connect with other enterprise software.

The most valuable feature of the webMethods Integration Server is the built-in monitoring, auditing, RETS, and SOAP services.

I like the solution's policies, transformation, mediation, and routing features.

The main benefit of this product is the speed of the development process and the speed of the business. It has a good integration server and a very good API portal. WebMethods has the tools to develop everything you need and the custom code is relatively easy. It makes the development, the product, and the business more efficient. This is a very strong and useful tool.

The developer portal is a valuable feature.

The most valuable aspect of this solution for me has been the configuration-based UI. Once you get the hang of it, it enables you to easily develop an API. In addition, it has many in-built policies that are quite handy. We are also able to write our custom policies. I also like the daily logging option. Another handy feature is Kibana with the dashboard, which outlines the day-to-day operations in great detail.

The most important thing when using it is that there is a really good community from the producers, Software AG, and the Empower platform, where you can find almost every kind of error or problem that you face. You can find a solution right there in the community.

There is also typical support where you can create a ticket if you are not able to find the issue on your own. If it's something new, then they will approach you and help you in resolving it. 

The best features are these adapters. Software AG developed many different adapters for the usual databases, et cetera. I was not using Salesforce much. However, it's really handy that you have an adapter for these popular platforms. It's just plug-and-play.

When it comes to the user interface, I'm already really used to it. I cannot say anything against it. For me, it's easy to use.

When there is some issue or bug, they work on the development of that. And then, in the next release, they just fix it. I had a few situations when I faced some issues, and then I had to report them. Within the next three weeks, typically, it just gets fixed.

The most valuable feature of webMethods Integration Server is all the capabilities it provides. We leverage most of the features, that they have offered to us. Our vendor has made some additional features on top of the webMethods Integration Server and we use all the features together.

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.

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. 

There are a few things about this product that we definitely like. It is very robust. If you build it nicely, you can't go wrong with it. It's rock solid.

The development is very fast. If you know what you're doing, you can develop something very easily and very fast.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I like the tool's scalability. 

The solution's most valuable features are web services, XML transformations, and adapters.

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. 

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

The performance is good.

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

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.

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.

I like the stability of the webMethods Integration Server.

On the API gateway, I would say the runtime metrics that the gateway collects are definitely useful.

The product provides a lot of insights into the operations of the API itself at runtime.

The cloud version of the solution is very easy to set up.

The stability has been good. The performance is strong.

The scalability is excellent overall.

We have found the technical support to be very helpful and responsive when we have questions.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature of the webMethods Integration Server is its reliability. It has a lot of great documentation from the service providers. Additionally, it is easy to use.

Currently, we're using this solution for the integration server which helps us to integrate with the mainframe.

When an organization is, for example, a bank, it can't use an open-source solution - even though open-source solutions are providing more current features. They need to go for a vendor-based solution like this product. 

It's a well-settled, mature platform.

The stability is good.

It can scale. 

Some of the key features are the integration platform, query mechanism, message handling within the bus, and the rules engine. We've had a really good experience with webMethods Integration Server.

webMethods Trading Networks is a good solution for interacting with outside of the organization. We can integrate the solutions with multiple outside the organization. 

We can create multiple users and different types of documents. The same document type we can process to the different kinds of partners. They are reusable, we can map to the respective document type.

Oracle's self-service capabilities, of which we make extensive use, is the most valuable feature. 

The Software AG Designer has been great. It's very intuitive.

The API Gateway is very good.

The Integration Server is very good.

Terracotta is very useful.

There are many components that I have used.

It's very flexible and a good platform to use.

On the portal, the user management and the API life cycle management are definitely robust. 

They have nominal features for API. They have a self-serve API portal as well. That means consumers for APIs can come onto the portal and learn about various APIs that they can put into the consumption model. 

The initial setup of the cloud version of the solution is very easy.

The solution can scale.

The product is quite stable.

Technical support is responsive and quite helpful.

We have found the pricing of the solution to be fair.

Because we use most of the platform, it's hard to call out a most valuable feature, but it's probably the ease of mapping which is the single largest feature. It gives us the ability to craft anything. A lot of single-purpose technologies, like Mirth, are good for healthcare messages, but we use webMethods not only for healthcare messages but for other business-related purposes, like integrations to Salesforce or integrations to Office 365. It's multi-purpose nature is very strong.

The ease of deploy and maintenance of integrations is a key element for us. If the strength is the mapping tool and the ability to change quickly, and having all of the components that we can then alter as we need to, the result is that it allows us to react very quickly to changing business demands. For example, we have a need to send the same types of data to many different integration partners, and because we're able to tailor the delivery to each endpoint, but use one master flow, it allows great economies of scale.

The internal services that they provide make it easy to work with. It's easy to construct new interfaces like apps, client portals, and so on because they consume the portal services that we provide.

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

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

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

The EDI is pretty robust with the IO. The solution they provide at Software AG is pretty good and solid. The integration with SAP is also good. Those are very solid compared to other products.

The designer is very helpful in developing services.

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

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

The most valuable feature is stability. 

What I found most valuable in webMethods Integration Server is its strong ESB. It also has strong API modules and portals.

In the API gateway, there is a new feature that allows us to filter logs within a payload. This has been a useful feature.

It is good for communicating between the systems and for publishing and subscribing. We can easily retrieve data. It is good in terms of troubleshooting and other things.

The best part of webMethods is the out-of-box features that it provides to users, which ultimately saves on effort put into development.

All of the components are very independent but are tied together to give the business value.

The EDI is very eye-catching.

The most valuable components of the solution are API management and EDI.

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

• API development
• Traditional ESB development
• B2B development.

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.

Ease of use.

The main assets are its 

• flow language
• debugging
• Broker. 

Flow language is far better and more flexible for debugging.

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

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

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.

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.

Best feature is Insight for monitoring, and as a debugging tool. It has saved us a lot of time during crisis situations.

Broker and UM are the best.

In my opinion, the best advantages are: 

• platform scaling
• graphical data mapper (Designer and webMethods Developer in oldest versions)
• integration BPM process layer with services
• service management via packages.

All of them are helpful.

How simple it is to create new solutions.

The Integration Server and Trading Networks Server. They are the building blocks of EAI in SAG products, and they offer a very good platform.

CentraSite for governance and life cycle management. It frankly fills the gap between IT and business by having approval and policy enforcement on each state and cycle of the asset from the moment it gets created until it is retired.

It is a bundled product stack for A2A and B2B usage. It is one of the best products which I have used during my integration career.

It has all the features required to integrate and manage file transfers, Partner Management, logging mechanisms, adapters for mainframes, SAP, and many others.

Ease of implementation and flexibility to hold the business logic are the most valuable features.

• Capability to handle almost all e-business standards: RosettaNet, EDI, ebXML Messaging Service, SWIFT, FIX, and CIDX
• Web-based user interface: Makes administration and monitoring much easier
• Segregation of user tasks: Controlled user permissions and gives better control over the TN environment
• Clear view of transactions: Makes analysis and monitoring easier
• Capability to set up Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs): Makes business secure and more efficient

High throughput and excellent scalability.

Having experience with various EAI and ESB tools like Oracle Service Bus (former BEA Aqualogic) and Webmethods summary would be that everything can be done with any technology.

However the difference may be the time needed in order to implement the same integration features based on the existing product features.

From my point of view a good EAI and ESB solution needs to have what Webmethods offers

• a layer on top to isolate developers from the J2EE implementation ie to avoid implementing integration services in pure Java as if you were just coding the integration in Java
• Provides needed adapters yes, but with an intuitive front end that allows you to configure and use them (e.g setup number of retries for transient connectivity errors) rather than program in Java to implement calls to use the adapters
• A platform that allows continuous integration with a deployment engine and dependencies (and their changes) resolved and centralized in the server as a repository.

Some features reviewed

• Unit testing & Debugging capabilities: Webmethods allows you to debug your services in a step by step mode with variable watchers whereas in other programming oriented EAI solutions the testing in not dynamic and we can only rely in SOAPUI executions and reviewing returned XMLs and logs. From my point of view this is a decision driver.
• Data Mapping capabilities and XML management: In Webmethods you don’t need to work with XML parsing (if you don’t really want to) and data mapping and transformation is natural and based on UI drag&drop capabilities (No need to use XQuery or XPath if not needed). In webmethods you work with the Pipeline concept and needed transformations using a GUI designer. Canonical document transformations can be created fairly simple. Document structure/schemas are centralized in the server repository so there are no discrepancies when a document structure changes. If a document structure changes all services using that document get automatically updated. I still recall how complicated it was to manage XML transformations, parsing and schema dependencies within other EAI packages. Mapping was basically relying again on coding, XSLT transformation and library dependencies.
• In other solutions, basic tasks (like setting up a DB connection and test that) should not start a huge discussion troubleshoot thread leading the developer to spend most of his time troubleshooting and discussing about technical issues e.g not why he/she cannot connect to the database.
• Deployment and code changes: Webmethods has a central repository where an app dev resource is locking a given resource. Until that resource is unlocked nobody else can work on that item. Once a component is changed there is no deployment, changes are already in that environment. Once the code has been changed and unit tested migrating this to the next environment is a matter of a couple of clicks (no need to restart the server or wait minutes before you can see the changes). This helps having a system that allows maintaining continuous integration.
• Audit and logs: This is natural and simple in Webmethods, you can flag any service to be audited in their log database (on success and/or errors, when the service starts, exits, including parameters or not). You don’t need to have any extra coding for that. You can then use those logs to run your reports in SQLServer.
• Small features that help speeding up development, just as an example: commenting steps in an integration process is fairly simple in Webmethods while in other EAI solutions is a nightmare or impossible.

Segregation of deployment for the environments is the most valuable feature of the solution.

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

webMethods Integration Server is an easy-to-use solution and does not require a lot of coding.

The solution's ease-of-use is its most valuable feature, in which complex issues may be resolved. The visibility with Java is not so easy. However, the solution allows a person to know where his application is in the ecosystem, which application he is using, what the protocol is and the number of requests. The solution makes identification easy. 

The tool supports gRPC. It is the best product in the market.

webMethods Trading Networks is a stable solution.