IBM Integration Bus Reviews

We use external integration with other entities and solutions outside of the enterprise.

The system's stability is the most valuable feature. Developing the integration is simple.

Recently, there was a lot of instability when selecting the solution they needed for testing. They said that the last one was the one that they enrolled. It's good, and it has good features. Nevertheless, I haven't tried to get it.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for ten years. 

The solution has been working since 2014. 

The scalability is a ten out of ten. Other competitors need to fix their solutions.

The solution's stability is ready to meet any business requirements you need. You can scale downtime, and you can have a container license that you can use with the product for free. This provides an advantage because with competitors, you would need to buy a container license.

They used to have traditional deployment nodes. Now it should be considered, but the customer needs to pay for the platform's cluster. With IBM, you have the Veritas and OpenShift licenses for three Autologics Veritas. 

The setup depends on the environment because this solution can fail when being fused. So it depends on the implementation. 

The containerization and the mobility of the setup for the personalization is implemented on top of the chip's head which comes for free with the product. Most of the middleware comes with a containerization option and deployment portal.

It needs more time to implement and set up the clusters for the data feature. When you implement it, it gives you host availability to expand and add more resources without the system interaction. There are two days of extra optimization for the cluster and it is very responsive. It gives you more scalability when the system is integrated. 

The price is reasonable considering the features we receive.

IBM Bus can't compete with other competitors. For Bus, you are banking on an enterprise solution. This is a lot of small and open-source software. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

The most valuable features of the IBM Integration Bus are the flexibility to easily integrate with other solutions, such as SAP or any other vendors.

The cloud deployment of the IBM Integration Bus should be made easier.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for approximately six years.

IBM Integration Bus is stable. We have a lot of infrastructure running on it, and it has worked well. We have many application integrations that we used it for, and we did not have that many issues.

The scalability of the IBM Integration Bus is good because it can scale within the application. The whole application installation has some scalability, not only the server. It's easy to scale.

We have approximately 20 developers using this solution and we do not plan to increase the usage.

I have used the support from IBM and they have a ticket priority system. For example, they assign priority to the ticket, such as P1, P2, and P3. P1 is the highest priority and P3 is the lowest. When we are assigned a P1 priority we have someone contact us directly from IBM.

I rate the support from IBM Integration Bus four out of five.

IBM Integration Bus's initial setup is straightforward. They made it really simple to install everything. The process only took a few minutes.

We did the implementation of the IBM Integration Bus in-house. We have two people for the maintenance and support of the solution.

IBM Integration Bus solution is expensive and this is one of the reasons we are looking for an alternative, such as MuleSoft.

There are some additional pieces of software we need to purchase to do certain kinds of integrations, this should be included and we should not have to pay extra.

My advice to others is this is a great solution if you can afford it.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

We are currently looking at other vendors, such as MuleSoft, to see what their offerings are.

We use IBM Integration Bus for document conversions.

We decided to move away from IBM Integration Bus for IT technical refreshments.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for ten years.

IBM Integration Bus is a stable solution.

I rate IBM Integration Bus a nine out of ten for stability.

IBM Integration Bus is a scalable solution.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

I rate the solution’s technical support an eight or nine out of ten.

Overall, I rate IBM Integration Bus a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for integrations of traffic between internal applications, communications, and transactions between various internal applications. We also use it for integration with various external parties.

Before we implemented IBM to integrate with other external parties, we had buckets of applications to build, and maintenance was difficult, as was support. On top of that, integration wasn't well controlled and managed. Right now, post-implementation of IBM ESB, we have a better structure. We have better teams in development and response to customers. We have an application that is centrally managed and monitored. We have better SOA experience in our development process.

The feature we find most useful is the ease of development.

It provides a variable within our application it can easily be used across various applications. 

ESQ is very robust and easy to learn. That's the language the solution is based on. 

The solution can scale.

The stability is mostly pretty good.

There are experiences we have on the application, such as latency issues. There are no inherent components for you to throttle and measure the velocity of transactions. For that, you have to get a separate application and set up more robust rules. Then, you can handle API throttling and a number of business logic and rules. You need to implement DataPower, in order to have this. It should have been integrated into a single application rather than having to deal with various applications and components. It would be nice if everything could be packaged under one solution.

Today, the IBM business rule engine, the DataPower is outside the Enterprise Service Bus. It's sold as a different feature or application. If it could be integrated, then it's able to handle a lot more of what we are doing now rather than just have a stateless ESB that you can't do much on, and a set of normal business rules.

If you have the business rule engine that can help us measure velocity, throttle, monetization, et cetera, within the ESB, it would be better than it is now. There won't be any need for one to start looking out for any possible change in the near future.

The initial setup is a bit complex. 

This is a very expensive product.

We've been using the solution for more than five years at this point. 

There is some latency and slowness in the application. At times, we have to restart the server, and there are some errors we can't handle. We send those to IBM. It's relatively stable, however, periodically, we have problems, which is why we have to get IBM to help us resolve them. That said, I would describe the product as stable.

In terms of extensibility to other applications after development, it's highly extensible. The solution can scale. 

We have developers, who develop various integration requirements, and we have support. Outside that, we don't have physical users using it. There are about 10 developers in all, that handle various requirements that come along. The support unit is about five people and they are handling the support.

We don't deal with IBM directly. There's a local partner of IBM that assists us. We only have a direct relationship with IBM, when the local partner cannot handle a problem. Our contract is designed with IBM in such a way that we have to go through their local partner. In terms of responsiveness, the local partner is good. I wouldn't say excellent, however, they are good in response time. In terms of timeline for issue resolution, TAT for issue resolution, they are fair.

Before we went to IBM, we didn't use a different solution, however, we checked in our industry and we checked how people felt about Microsoft middleware, and they didn't have a good experience. It's not robust, the support wasn't strong, et cetera. Therefore, we chose IBM. We were swayed by how other organizations, including banks in Nigeria, were mostly seeing success with IBM.

We are using WSO2 for some applications, however, we do not rely on it completely as it is open-source and if we run into issues we cannot rely on help from any support.

Setting up the solution is not straightforward. It's difficult and complex. We needed assistance in order to manage the process properly. It's not something you can just pick up, and then, run on your own. You need help from a partner, which involves additional costs.

We didn't do it alone. We worked with IBM, and then, IBM nominated a local partner in Nigeria that worked with us to set this up.

The solution is very expensive. 

We looked at another solution called WSO2. It is a lot easier to set up. It's easier to use, and it's less expensive. However, the challenge we have with that, is that the support is lacking as it is an open-source application. The support is not so strong. That's the only reservation we had for that. Outside that, we are also using it for some other applications as well.

The prominent other contenders were WebLogic from Oracle, and whatever was provided by Microsoft. Among the three then, IBM came out on top in our assessment and rating. However, with the benefit of the insights we now have, if we were to do the same process again, over five years, WSO2 has done so well, and some other middleware is also doing well. Likely we would not choose IBM if we had to choose again.

We are customers and end-users.

I'd rate the solution around a seven out of ten.

I would advise companies to evaluate and consider the options and whether they make sense vis-a-vis the benefit they hope to derive is worth the while. IBM is not cheap. They need to consider costs and make sure they have internal resources available to them. Those using the solution need to be well trained. Otherwise, the company will end up depending on third parties for everything, and that will drive up the costs further. 

I'd also suggest companies implement such a solution early. Load balancing is very critical in our experience. We didn't implement load balancing immediately, and that affected us. As a company is implementing, it should consider load balancing. Rather than invest on the on-prem, a company should consider the cloud. We did on IBM Unix servers on-prem, and that's pretty expensive.

We work with multiple customers, and this is one of the tools we use to help them with integration.

I like the API lead integration, which is more focused, and I also like real-time integration.

The price could be better. It would also be better if they simplified the code.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for more than 15 years.

IBM Integration Bus is a stable solution.

On a scale from one ten, I would give stability a nine.

IBM Integration Bus is a scalable solution. We have about 1000 users and 30 applications.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give scalability an eight.

IBM's technical support is pretty good. They are very quick to respond once we raise a PMR with them.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. We already have a CI/CD pipeline in place. We just have to create the images, and then automation takes over and deploys it quickly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give the initial setup a nine.

We deployed this solution. We have two to three people who do this.

IBM Integration Bus is expensive. There are cheaper products in the marketplace.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give the pricing a two. 

I would recommend this product as it's an IBM product. However, it all depends on the use case. If it's heavy machine-based transactions, I recommend IBM Integration Bus. But if it's API-based, I would recommend another solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM Integration Bus a six.

We used the solution for opening new accounts for a banking system. Our client used some old techniques and didn’t have an integration layer. I created an account opening application for our client.

IBM Integration Bus is a very strong tool. It helps in integrating the front-end and back-end systems.

We have to stop the integration server to start the debugging process. The debugging mechanism of other products is better than that of IBM.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I did not face any issues with the solution’s stability.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is easy, but the database is quite heavy for the local DC. It was also a little bit complex to connect to some databases.

The deployment of the solution is very easy. We just add the integration server and drag and drop the services to the integration server. We deployed the solution in-house. We do not face any trouble in the maintenance of the product.

I am a system integrator. In Software AG, debugging does not intervene with any other process. I also use Software AG webMethods and TIBCO. Software AG webMethods is the best product because it is very easy to develop and flexible. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product helps us develop integration applications. It also enables communication between applications from different environments.

The features I have found most valuable in this solution are transformation and routing.

IBM Integration Bus doesn’t provide some features that MuleSoft provides. These features should be added to the solution.

The product does not provide API management. We have to use a separate tool called API Connect for our needs. It would be good if IBM could combine these tools.

I have been using the solution for the past nine years.

I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

The people in our organization who faced scalability issues deployed the product on the cloud, where they could make it scalable. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

I have spoken with the support team about a couple of issues. They were really helpful, and the response was very fast.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We did not face any challenges.

It took us a couple of minutes to deploy the product. We deployed the solution with our in-house team. A team of two to three administrators usually monitors the product in the production environment.

I am using the latest version of the solution. We use Jenkins to deploy the applications we build on IBM Integration Bus. My organization is one of the largest IT service providers, with hundreds of customers across the globe.

We depend on IBM for patches when there are some issues in the production environment. I am a developer, and I work in solution development. I have worked with multiple organizations for multiple accounts. I would recommend the solution to others. IBM Integration Bus is a leading product.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use IBM Integration Bus for application integration. For example, when application A needs to communicate with application B, if Application A is sending the message data in XML format but application B understands the data in JSON format, there needs to be a tool that helps to transform the message data and route the data from one endpoint to another. In such a use case, we use IBM Integration Bus.

I'm working on version 10.0.0.12 of IIB, but we will be migrating the project that I'm currently working on to IBM App Connect Enterprise. It will most probably happen in the summer of this year.

It is deployed on-premises. After the migration to IBM App Connect Enterprise, we're planning to migrate to the cloud from on-premises.

In our project, we are using IBM Integration Bus for doing the payments. We have developed some applications in IBM Integration Bus that help with payment transactions from one client to another.

We can have multiple endpoints, and we can integrate different applications from different platforms. In a large-scale enterprise setup, it becomes so easy to establish communication between applications. You can connect an application to other applications, other legacy applications, and databases. You can also connect with those applications that are in the cloud.  You can connect with other well-known applications, such as Salesforce, SAP, and Workday, by using IBM Integration Bus.

It provides all the features that are required for day-to-day work. So far, I haven't seen any major issues that impact our work. I have been told that IBM App Connect Enterprise, which is the next version of IIB, is really good. It is better than IIB, and it gives you more coverage in terms of application integration.

I have been working with this solution for seven years.

It is stable.

You can scale the product depending upon the flux of data into your application.

It depends upon the issue we are working on. I would rate them a four out of five.

Its initial setup was not that tough or challenging. We could easily do the setup without any challenges.

Usually, we have the support team of a project. The support team takes care of such installations.

Its maintenance is easy. It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain the product. The Infra team usually does some patching of the environment, but we haven't seen any outage of our application that impacts the business in real-time.

It is a really good product to use if there are lots of applications that need to be integrated in your enterprise. It is a very good solution for enterprise application integration and exposing your product's features to the external client through APIs. 

I have worked with other tools related to IIB, such as API Gateway and API configuration tools, in the past. They do provide a very good solution for your business if you are planning to expose your business assets by creating APIs. You can develop an API in IIB and configure it in API Connect. You can have that gateway on top of the solution. This is another feature you can leverage using IIB.

Based on my experience with this product, I would rate it an eight out of 10. This reduction of two points doesn't mean that it is not as good as other products.