IBM DataPower Gateway Reviews

The appliance version is one of the top, most powerful products on the market.

The most valuable features of this solution are the appliance hardware, the software embedded within the hardware appliance machine.

This is one of the best security platforms in the market. 

It is easy to use, easy to install, and it's resilient for high availability.

In the next release, I would like to see the product price reduced. It should be cheaper.

We have been implementing IBM DataPower Gateway for more than 10 years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

It is a scalable product.

This is a supported gateway. It does not have front end users. It has a number of transactions. You compare the number of transactions, for the development and product utilization.

We have plans to continue using it in the future.

It depends on the level of contact between you and the customer, as well as the level of severity of the ticket. If you have a critical severity, you get an excellent response. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to install.

If it is an appliance, just plug and play, and to configure the network connectivity it'll take a maximum of one day.

If it is the software it'll take a maximum of about one day.

You only need one person to maintain this solution.

It's expensive when you compare it with others. If you are going with the software then you can get a good deal, but the appliance version is expensive.

Customers have to pay for licensing.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate IBM DataPower Gateway a ten out of ten.

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.

Positive

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.

We use both cloud and on-premise solutions. We focus on the BFSI, one of India's largest banks, as well as the financial sector and telecommunications.  

We implement the solution for our clients and currently have more than 70 staff members on our team. 

Since it is a gateway, it provides a lot of security features. It's also easy to use with not much development needed. We can deploy mostly with the drag-and-drop policies. 

Right now, the programming language is only supported in XSLT and Gateway script. Offering another programming language like Python would be better for all. We had one difficulty with signing and encryption, which it doesn't support in the data pool but does in Java programming language. It wasn't contained in the latest algorithm, so that's an issue we faced with one customer. 

We have been using it for the last five years.

The data pool product is stable and we did not find any bugs. API management launched two years back and we consider it quite unstable because we still face a lot of bugs. 

The solution is best for medium to large companies and is easy to scale. 

We are in yearly contact with technical support. We have reported every bug and they try to fix them within a short span of time. If they can't fix bugs quickly, they include them in new releases and give an ETA to us. Knowledge base and response time could be improved. 

Neutral

This is the solution we currently implement for our customers. 

Initial setup is very easy. If you go with container deployment, it can be a little bit tricky. The first time you install a container you will face issues, but the next time will be easier. 

We implement the solution for our clients. We also provide maintenance every quarter to give support to the production environment. If the client needs extra features, the project is more complex and takes more development time. 

The cost is very high and requires all five components in the API management solution, such as API Portal, Analytics, and App Connect. But with MuleSoft, everything is with a single vendor. 

We want to explore MuleSoft and introduce it to our company. We are not going to replace IBM right now, but we want to be able propose either IBM or MuleSoft based on customer requirements such as features and cost. 

We are a gold partner with IBM. DataPower Gateway is quite cool but API Manage needs to be more stable. Without testing, they released the product into the market. This is what we have observed. Sometimes, even small features in the big product do not work.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten. 

It is used for simple integrations that require high speed, and you need to use it in a cluster if you want it to be highly available.

For me, its most valuable features include:

• the fact that it's high-speed
• its ability to be remotely administered via an API
• the fact that it can deal with multiple protocols
• it's very quick to make changes to the setup.

Care needs to be taken when applying firmware upgrades, as they often fail.

Also, the components that they include in the product that are, in fact, a WTX, really need to be removed from the product because they tend to fail. It's got some native capabilities and it's gotten some imported capabilities and you need to know the history of the product to understand the difference between the two. Most notable is the COBOL copybook handling, which is really straight out of WTX. It's poorly supported and often leads to failures.

I have been working with IBM WebSphere DataPower for about a decade.

Like all things, it does fail, but if it's in a cluster you can have continuous availability. If the cluster is set up properly, it has multiple network ports so you can have redundant network connections. If a component does fail — meaning one appliance can fail, and they have failed — it's unlikely that all of them will fail together. So a minimal configuration of two appliances in each of the two sites is a good idea. Or you could be using the virtual alternatives on a cloud in multiple zones or on multiple clouds.

It's horizontally scalable.

When using it as a certain kind of pass-thru, I've measured it to 6,000 transactions per second. If you're using it in a request-reply pattern, that comes down to about 600. The 6,000 was the limit on the testing equipment. It wasn't the limit on the product.

Technical support is becoming rare because it's an old product.

I've used Message Broker from IBM, Oracle Service Bus, and TIBCO.

DataPower has the advantage in that it's more limited in capabilities than the other products, so it's harder to accidentally write applications as part of your integration. If you follow strict patterns then your business logic will stay in the applications and your integration logic will only be on the DataPower. Like all devices, you can actually go to extra effort to put application logic into the DataPower, but that just ruins the device for its intended purpose.

The setup is simple; it's an appliance.

All the products I've used could be priced lower. Perhaps with the exception of something like SnapLogic, they are very expensive.

TIBCO is expensive. It is reliable but it takes longer to develop and deploy. I haven't had much experience with their new microgateways, which may, in fact, provide more value. Oracle is expensive and probably more fragile. Message Broker is quite expensive but quite reliable.

If you've got it, you should use it. If you haven't got it, you probably should be looking at newer products such as SnapLogic.

It's a high-speed device. If you need an appliance on-premise, that would be the way to go. If you need to migrate something that's on-premise to the cloud, you could go to the virtual. If you're doing something new, you probably wouldn't touch it.

I like the tool's security. Also, all functionalities are integrated within on platform. 

I would like the tool to improve its training. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. 

I would rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. We have many users for the tool in our company. We have plans to increase the software's usage in the future. 

We found the tool's deployment simple because we had developed many tools to implement it automatically. 

The tool's initial costing is expensive for small banks and financial institutions. 

You need to develop tools to improve the deployment of the solution. 

We are using it for reinforcing data security policies, routing, and doing B2B transactions. There's more B2B as well as the ESB, the enterprise service bus.

This is a Gateway application provided by IBM. You have a lot of controls over the messages coming in, and how you can ensure these conform to your standards.

It can look for the various security threats, productions, payload scanning, and perform routing based on the content type.

You have various business to business integrations and mappings.

It would be great if the CI/CI and DevOps components were part of this offering.

Having some pre-packaged proposals or integration solutions would be helpful, like many of the iPass providers are now supplying.

Some pre-packaged connectors for integration with various applications, such as SaaS offerings, would be a useful addition.

We have been working with the IBM DataPower Gateway for approximately seven years.

With respect to scalability, the new IDG X2 appliances come with a lot of power inside these appliances so you won't have any issues. It comes with a 24-core machine, which should be powerful enough for your workloads.

We are using the on-premises, hardware application, so scalability comes at a cost. It means that you will need to install another application and another appliance.

We have been in contact with technical support and they are pretty quick. IBM has the proper support portals. The knowledge center and user community are up to date.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is well-documented in the IBM Knowledge Center.

Deployment takes between two and three hours for each appliance.

The cost of this product varies from customer to customer and the relationship with IBM, including how many offerings from IBM are already being used.

I recommend this solution. It is a good security application and it incorporates integrations and the latest security controls that are available in the market.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using the solution for security purposes.

The solution's security feature is its most valuable feature.

It is a costly product. So, it is not an open-source solution, making it costly.

In the future, I would like to see an open-source version.

I have been using IBM DataPower Gateway since 2018. Also, I am using IBM DataPower Gateway Firmware V7.2. I am an end user of the solution.

The product is stable.

The product is scalable. In m company, six people are using the solution. I don't know if my company is planning to increase usage in the future.

I rate IBM's technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I don't know. I think I'm not suitable to speak about deployment because I am using the solution that was already deployed in my company.

The installation is easy, especially on VMware.

I didn't pay for the product. I worked in a company where we were using the tool.

The product is easy to use.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

The solution's most valuable features are security and consistent availability.

It is challenging to understand the solution's design and support skills. We have to keep importing skills all the time. It requires a technical person to understand multiple operating systems environments. They should make it more accessible for entry-level developers. Also, they should add features to manage API integrations.

We have been using the solution for over 15 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is very scalable.

The solution's technical support is excellent. They have created data centers where we can raise queries. 

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is easy. It takes two weeks to build custom-specific prototypes.

The solution has a return on investment but is a little expensive. One of its licenses costs $10,000. The additional costs depend on the pricing models for technology support.

I recommend the solution to enterprise companies. It is an excellent product if you have to set it up on the cloud. Although, hosting it on the existing cloud is complicated. I rate it as an eight.