We have a global banking customer who uses IBM DataPower Gateway to expose their APIs for customer use.
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.
The user interface or the application development perspective and customization of the tool could be a little better.
I've been using this product for more than five years now.
It is stable, and the performance is good as well.
It is easy to scale as the product itself has the capability to install it as a cluster. So it can be scaled vertically or horizontally.
We have a team of about 10 developers and 10 to 15 enterprise customers globally.
For this particular product, the technical support is good.
I would give them an eight out of ten because there are some stability issues related to new features that have been added. They could have tested them and released them later rather than releasing them right now.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward because it's an appliance, so you don't have much complexity from an installation and configuration perspective. I would give the setup process a five out of five.
We implemented it in-house. It hardly takes any time; perhaps a day or two.
The only maintenance you need to be worried about is upgrading the patches, and you need to make sure that you apply those on time. We have two people who are responsible for the maintenance and administration.
This product is a bit expensive as IBM products are costly assets. However, for enterprise customers it is a worthwhile investment.
The licensing cost is based on the PVU and will depend upon the number of CPUs used for the virtual appliances.
If you are buying the license based on the PVUs, then you won't have any additional costs because all of the features will be available. However, if you are not going with the product with the PVU and you're going with certain features, then you will need to add those features, specifically security features, and pay for them. That is, there are certain features that are on a pay-per-feature basis if you are not going with a PVU license.
I would give pricing a rating of three out of five.
If you are an enterprise customer, I would definitely advise that it is better to go for IBM DataPower. You won't need to have a proxy or any other security measures required in the DMC, and it is easy to implement and easy to maintain and scale.
Overall, I would rate IBM DataPower Gateway at ten out of ten.