IBM Integration Bus Reviews

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 are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. Usually, they want to use this for consolidating the services. It is used to integrate their core insurance systems with the rest of the environment.

We try to enable this kind of service-oriented architecture (SOA) to assist our clients with consolidating all of their services.

The most valuable feature is the API integration.

The integration is difficult to manage.

Migrating to this solution is complex and it would be helpful if they had a way to convert existing integrations.

We have been using IBM Integration Bus for more than three years.

From a scalability point of view, I think that this product is good.

I would say that it is good for an enterprise-level customer.

We receive our technical support through an IBM partner in Taiwan. However, developing this kind of project required asking for assistance from the IBM Lab Services. Without Lab Services, our support would not have been as strong.

Migrating to this solution is complicated and not simple to do if they already have API integration between systems.

We also work with TIBCO and Oracle ESB solutions. We find that our customers have had a good experience with them and there is always a lot of interest in these two products.

IBM Integration Bus is a good product and I would recommend it for enterprise customers.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

It is used for the banking domain and telco. We use it for integration between vendors from core banking and the other channels, for example, buyers, CRM and codes.

The most valuable thing is the loose coupling and making the change in only one stack of the ESB layer or the middleware layer. This helps in big projects and when we have multiple channels calling back at the same time.

The Toolkit itself is based on Eclipse and Java, and it does not respond sometimes. When we are working on the Toolkit using or working on our PCs or remote desktop the program has issues with performance. The performance needs to be enhanced. More labs for developers who want to learn about this technology for trial. They may provide a trial version of App Connect or Toolkit to try it for themselves.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for the past five years.

It is very stable and used by very large companies and banking in EMEA, or in Egypt and the Middle East. It is used in very stable projects and critical ones that have payment transactions, like wallets or through transactions, and internet banking.

It is very scalable.  We have twenty different developer and administrator teams working with it.

If we have to fix an installation or other support needed, an administrator opens a ticket with IBM and they support it, especially if it is in the license agreement with them. But, I am a developer, not related to technical support. From the community side, I would rate technical support a seven out of ten because IBM documentation is available over the internet and on other websites.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and takes about one minute to deploy

We have the enterprise edition, and it is licensed yearly. I do not know what the cost is.

They can converge other products, ESB, or SOAR architecture. I may recommend IBM as a solution tool for a business if they are looking for a stable environment. They will find support on the community forum. I would rate IBM Integration Bus a seven out of ten.

We are using IBM Integration Bus as a messaging solution for our customers. They have legacy systems. Some are MQ systems, file-based systems, app-based systems, and ERP systems. We place it in the middle of integrations. One system sends messages or communicates to another system written by us.

I am into microservices using Java Spring Boot, but if we are using legacy systems, IBM Integration Bus is very good for them. They have their own computational logic called EC12, their own proprietary language. You can do any kind of complex logic and can implement other ESVs that I have seen.

IBM Integration Bus can improve JSON Schema validations. We don't have any kind of nodes that can support that kind of validation. If we want to containerize it by means of the docker's containers in the clouds, we are not able to manage it very well.

In a future update, IBM Integration Bus could add better API management. It only supports Swagger at this time.

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

IBM Integration Bus sometimes hangs but the IBM App Connect Enterprise successor version is a lot better.

IBM Integration Bus scalability depends. The scalable of the on-premise version is difficult to scale. For example, if you're using the file processing that can be locked on the files and there is an increase in the number of threads there is some limit. The cloud version is not the same, by using a container, we can scale up to any extreme level. That kind of scalable is not there in the on-premise version.

We have 10 to 15 people using the solution.

I never interacted with IBM for technical support. However, my clients have and they have had a good experience.

I have not worked with other solutions similar to IBM Integration Bus.

The initial setup of IBM Integration Bus version 7 was complex, but the 10 and 11 versions were not difficult. We are using IBM App Connect Enterprise, the successor version of the IBM Integration Bus. IBM Integration Bus no longer exists, but the installation was quite easy. This is a single-step installation. The installation can take approximately 15 to 20 minutes.

The price of the IBM Integration Bus is expensive. If you compare the price to the cloud version you can purchase what you need but the on-premise version price is flat.

We evaluated other solutions.

In the modern integrations in the EPAs world, IBM Integration Bus is not well fitted, because if we have legacy systems, it is fine, but if you want to manage the EPA, govern the EPA to allow people to choose the different platforms, such as the cloud platform, Mule CloudHub I would not recommend it. For the legacy integrations, I can recommend this solution.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

IBM Integration Bus can be deployed in many ways, such as on-premise, cloud, and hybrid. 

The current customer that we have wants to have a hybrid deployment. We're investigating how they can manage to do it. For the hybrid deployment, they will have an instance running in a docker image, or in an Amazon AWS. The heavy operations will be done by the on-premise version. Which is what we currently have.

The most valuable features of the IBM Integration Bus are flexibility. It's also an alternative for integrating it with other projects, which we are not ready at this time to do, such as switching to tunnels. The tunnels would be used with other partners to make sure everything is secured.

IBM Integration Bus could improve by having a more lightweight installation. Additionally, automation could improve.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for approximately 13 years.

IBM Integration Bus is highly stable.

We have approximately four clients using this solution.

The technical support is very good, they have a fast response.

The installation of the IBM Integration Bus was straightforward. The time frame that it takes for the deployment depends on the environment the customer has. 

The licensing model of IBM Integration Bus is good. It's a yearly subscription. However, the price is depending on the model that you choose. If it's a Cloud version, then you can pay per month or you can pay it annually upfront. There are three-year options available, but it depends on what deployment you have.

As more people are moving operations toward the Cloud. The Clouds are offering subscriptions. They will charge you based on what they're processing. Whereas the on-premise version, the vendors offer a perpetual license. It doesn't have those limitations that the subscriptions models have for the number of transactions. What most of the vendors are doing is they will more or less charge you for a small, medium, or large package based on the number of transactions and they will bill your account.

IBM Integration Bus is a very good solution and they have come a long way with improvements over the years.

I rate IBM Integration Bus a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for IBM Integration Bus is that it is rigid, scalable, and offers high availability with minimal to no data loss. We have developed services that utilize IBM MQ to transfer data. Our service is running every day at the airport.

The error handling and monitoring functionalities of IBM Integration Bus are very good. However, Red Hat offers better monitoring tools.

IBM Integration Bus can improve by implementing no-code or drag-and-drop adapters development, similar to what is available in Red Hat. Additionally, the monitoring features could be improved.

I have experience working with IBM ESB for almost ten years.

I would rate the solution's stability at nine out of ten.

I would rate the solution's scalability at eight out of ten.

The customer service and support can be rated as eight out of ten, and I find them to be good.

Positive

Before using IBM Integration Bus, we used various other solutions, including TIPCO. I don't remember all of them now.

The initial setup of IBM Integration Bus was very difficult, especially during development. It was challenging to configure and install the solution on personal laptops or PCs when trying to download the free version for testing.

We used a third party for the deployment. We used to develop on top of an Integration Bus, however, we did not do the startup installation or installation field ourselves.

The pricing of IBM Integration Bus is very high, which is the biggest negative for us. It is one of the reasons why we opted for a different solution now.

I would recommend IBM Integration Bus because of its scalability and high stability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I worked with Integration Bus for a UK-based insurance client and banking domain client. Our main use cases are for integrating different systems. We were involved in integrating their master data management domain.

The message queue connectors are the most valuable feature. They have built-in connectors for most of the systems, like SAP and Oracle Database.

The password settings need improvement. 

I have been using Integration Bus for five years. 

The solution is highly stable. 

The scalability is very high. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The pricing of the solution is high. 

Overall, I would rate the product a ten 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.