IBM DataPower Gateway Reviews

Vendor: IBM

4.2 out of 5

28 reviews
96% willing to recommend

869 followers

What is IBM DataPower Gateway?

IBM DataPower Gateway is a robust, secure next-generation enterprise-grade single multichannel API gateway that supplies dynamic access, integration, control, and outstanding security. The solution is available in a broad range of workload capabilities, including application programming interface (API), service oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, cloud, web, and mobile. These dynamic capabilities ensure users are able to quickly increase the reach of an organization's critical IT resources to new channels, which will provide shareholders, team members, and clients with safe, secure access at all times.

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IBM DataPower Gateway is the #1 ranked solution in top SOA Application Gateways, #6 ranked solution in top Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions, #9 ranked solution in top Application Infrastructure solutions, and #11 ranked solution in top API Management solutions. PeerSpot users give IBM DataPower Gateway an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. IBM DataPower Gateway is most commonly compared to Actional Intermediary: IBM DataPower Gateway vs Actional Intermediary. IBM DataPower Gateway is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 76% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a financial services firm, accounting for 31% of all views.

Buyer's Guide

IBM DataPower Gateway

January 2025

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Featured reviews

Mehdi El Filahi

Co-Founder at tenekit

While I like IBM products, I'm not an evangelist. I work with Java, Microsoft ASP.NET, and various technologies. I'm not tied to any specific vendor. However, I do find IBM to be a bit greedy. It's a large, profit-driven company. The support team is mostly based in India, and they follow a very structured process and protocol. Sometimes, it feels like playing ping pong with them – lots of back and forth before the problem gets escalated. You might even have to get your sales rep involved to push things along. For me, the support it could be better. Indian support teams aren't inherently bad, but with IBM, it feels impersonal. They respond, sure. But if it's a complex technical issue, they might ask you a lot of questions that just seem designed to waste your time. Sometimes it feels like they hope you'll get frustrated and solve the problem yourself.

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Bálint Tóth

Solution Manager at Intalion

An area for improvement in IBM DataPower Gateway is its price point because it's a relatively expensive product. Sometimes, when the customer use case is just a very small subset of what's being offered in IBM DataPower Gateway, then the product can be expensive, making my company lose some of the opportunities because of the expensive pricing. A lower price point for IBM DataPower Gateway, even if that results in a less feature-rich version, would be appreciated. In terms of additional features that I'd like to see in the next release of IBM DataPower Gateway, nothing specific comes to mind because IBM constantly improves its standards and provides quarterly updates to the product, so it's quite fine.

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Sathyan K

Founder, Director at PerfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

The initial setup is very simple. The deployment is both on-premise and cloud. There are not many challenges in configuring or using it. It has both software and appliance capabilities, so it's up to you how you use it. If you want to customize HCL or HCL disk configurations on the appliance, there might be some challenges, but otherwise not. Whenever there's a custom requirement, they release patches. Newer versions of the appliances always have updated features, so security compliance is taken care of. We do not integrate directly with AI, but APIs that are executed through the gateway can be integrated with AI on the backend. It depends on how the backend has been integrated, as the gateway itself only protects endpoints.

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IBM DataPower Gateway mindshare

Product category:

As of January 2025, the mindshare of IBM DataPower Gateway in the SOA Application Gateways category stands at 10.6%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

SOA Application Gateways

PeerAnalyst reports

Type	Title	Date
Product	Reviews, tips, and advice from real users	Jan 17, 2025	Download

Title	Rating	Mindshare	Recommending
Actional Intermediary	0.0	28.8%	0%	0 interviews Add to research
Expressway Service Gateway	0.0	31.8%	0%	0 interviews Add to research

Valuable Features

"If you have an API application in your organization that you want to make safe and secure, in addition to your existing WAF or load balancer, this product comes with all those capabilities:"
"The MPGW (Multi-Protocol Gateway) is great because it allows you to easily expose services using various protocols – web services, REST (JSON), and others. This flexibility simplifies things."
"It is very easy to set up and configure, even for users with no prior experience."

Room for Improvement

IBM DataPower Gateway is costly and complex, requiring extensive training. Firmware upgrades and COBOL copybook handling often lead to failures. Users find the interface and scripting challenging, and the initial setup is difficult. Integration with other products and DevOps processes needs improvement. Support for additional programming languages and better clustering features is desired. JSON support and SSL key management require enhancements. Postgres and SQL database integration is lacking. Documentation and user-friendliness could be improved.

"Small and medium-sized companies might look for cloud-hosted applications due to the cost."
"DataPower isn't the most user-friendly tool. It is not an easy tool to use. Some things could use better wizards to guide you through processes."
"One area that could be improved is the integration with Postgres and SQL databases. Currently, IBM DataPower Gateway only integrates with Oracle databases."

Pricing

"The product is expensive."
"The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."

Scalability

IBM DataPower Gateway is highly adaptable for enterprises, enabling easy expansion with horizontal and vertical scaling options. It supports large-scale operations, especially suitable for IT departments. While physical versions have cost and complexity concerns, virtual appliances offer better flexibility. Users appreciate its handling of significant transactions, yet note scalability challenges for smaller firms due to expenses. The tool's capabilities are well-rated, with larger companies praising its performance for handling extensive user loads.

Stability

IBM DataPower Gateway is regarded as highly stable with consistent performance and reliability, especially favored by banks and financial institutions for its robust security. Users report successful deployment in both physical and virtual setups, often without downtime, even under heavy transaction loads. Issues are rare, typically due to misconfigurations. Customers frequently rate its stability highly, appreciating its capacity for continuous availability through clustering and redundant network connections, ensuring operational continuity and dependability.

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our IBM DataPower Gateway Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

By reviewers

By visitors reading reviews

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

31%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Healthcare Company

Energy/Utilities Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Media Company

Transportation Company

University

Educational Organization

Comms Service Provider

Non Profit

Construction Company

Wellness & Fitness Company

Hospitality Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

Legal Firm

Logistics Company

Outsourcing Company

Compare IBM DataPower Gateway with alternative products

Learn more about IBM DataPower Gateway

DataPower Gateway is very flexible and is widely available in virtual, cloud, traditional, physical, Docker, and Linux form factors.

IBM DataPower Gateway Features

IBM DataPower Gateway has many value-added features. Some of these features are included below:

Control: The solution provides decision point authorization and authentication for all standards, including Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP) and Open Authorization (OAuth), which allow for better access control across an organization’s entire network.
DataPower dashboard: The dashboard is specifically designed to enhance performance and determine problematic processes. The solution provides intuitive real-time performance transparency to diagnose operational and performance anomalies and offer repair and restoration recommendations.
Enhanced messaging: Users are able to easily mediate messaging and protocols by incorporating the best of today’s traditional and modern application standards.
Integration: IBM DataPower Gateway offers super fast mainframe connectivity, database connectivity, transport protocol bridging, content-based routing, and any-to-any message transformation, ensuring secure and immediate connect service.

IBM DataPower Gateway Benefits

IBM DataPower Gateway provides many benefits. Some of those benefits include:

Flexibility: The solution is easy to use and configure and provides for a pleasant, intuitive overall user experience. The solution can immediately be used out of the box, which makes overall process management simple.
Protection: The solution provides sturdy continuous service protection and application performance using robust powerful routing and traffic control.
Security: The solution’s enterprise-grade De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) ready gateway enables users to enforce the desired runtime application security across all messaging protocols.
Profitability: The solution’s design ensures significant reduction of development costs in addition to the streamlining of overall operations. Users are able to achieve reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) and experience a near-immediate ROI.

Reviews from Real Users

“My company has a good impression of IBM DataPower Gateway. What I like about it is that because it's an appliance, it's a turnkey solution that's very fast and out of the box. Another valuable feature of IBM DataPower Gateway is that it's easy to integrate with other products.”- Bálint T., Solution Manager at Intalion

“You don't have to have a separate DMC proxy because DataPower Gateway is an appliance and will take care of a lot of security features. These include data validations, encryption, as well as XML or any type of scripting or security threats that are present. From a security point of view, being an appliance in the DMC zone, IBM DataPower Gateway will take care of the entire security angle for the infrastructure.” - Sathyan K., Founder/Director at perfTech Solutions Pvt Ltd

IBM DataPower Gateway was previously known as WebSphere DataPower, IBM DataPower, IBM WebSphere DataPower.