webMethods.io Reviews

The API Gateway and the Portal go together. It's not one or the other. Essentially they're just leveraged for overall enterprise API management facilities, being able to go on the API development life cycle, being able to go on the API run time, API monetization, things like that. Usually, most organizations, most of our customers use APIs to supplement other architectures, typically microservices, based application architecture, and so on.

On the portal, the user management and the API life cycle management are definitely robust. 

They have nominal features for API. They have a self-serve API portal as well. That means consumers for APIs can come onto the portal and learn about various APIs that they can put into the consumption model. 

The initial setup of the cloud version of the solution is very easy.

The solution can scale.

The product is quite stable.

Technical support is responsive and quite helpful.

We have found the pricing of the solution to be fair.

On the API monetization side, being able to create separate consumption plans and throttle all those consumption plans towards the run time. Those are abilities that might need some improvements.

The on-premises setup can be difficult.

I've been dealing with the solution over the last three or so years at least.

The stability and performance are definitely very good. 3G really comes strong on an enterprise-scale in terms of stability and performance. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches.

The solution can scale quite well. A company that needs to scale can do so.

API management is all about internally leveraging the software development life cycle, across various domains. Typically, most customers, when they adopt API management, they are delivering it for their entire IT software development organization, not just the integration team. The application team and the database team and so on will also use it. Everybody will be on board. Sometimes we have seen customers onboard about 60, 70 developers and then maybe a few additional external consumers. However, we also see some customers with very small teams of around 10 people. It works well for both.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. There's always that possibility, especially with newer versions, that we might run into some technical issues. However, tech support and issue management are both pretty straightforward. 

You can now create a ticket on an issue with the portal on Software AG through Software AG's support portal. They respond within a day, and at least try to resolve the issue. Sometimes the issues might need a product or a quote fix, which might take a day or two. Otherwise, they might be able to look through the knowledge base and give us a solution immediately. In general, they have a decent response time and a decent quality of service. We're satisfied. 

In terms of setting up the solution, there are two ways. The first is that you can have an on-premise license and set up this conference yourself. That can be a little complex depending on what is the overall deployment architecture that is needed. On the other side, webMethods API also comes in a cloud form, the webMethods.io, and that is just a subscription. Most of our customers can just subscribe to it and they don't really have to worry about the setup. Everything is already pre-set.

Usually, while the on-premises setup is fairly complex, we don't really require people to be continuously monitoring it once it's launched. The setup itself might take less than a week or two, depending on the size of the enrollment. In terms of maintenance, unless there's a lot of APIs subsequently developed and running, you don't really have too much. Once the customer starts developing a lot of APIs and puts a lot of those APIs into production, that's what will contribute to the support and monitoring needs of the team. Typically one person can handle deployment and maintenance. Of course, the cloud doesn't really require the same amount of work. 

The pricing fluctuates. I don't have the numbers with me, however, I can say that they're not the cheapest in the market, and they're not the most expensive either. They fall right in the middle, and they're priced right for their capabilities and the quality of service as well as the stability and performance on offer. They're well priced for their general offering.

We are partners with Software AG. We've been a partner for more than 20 years now.

I'm an IT consultant. We are a consulting company, most of my teams are certified in Software AG technology, and we've worked for a lot of customers leveraging that technology.

We typically deal with the most up-to-date versions of the solution, although occasionally, one or two might be a version behind.

A lot of the API Portal and Gateway form the layer of API management, however, usually, API management does not go on its own. There's typically some level of an integration layer behind it as well. Either a customer is applying an API management layer on top of an existing integration layer, or, if not, a customer is starting fresh and has to apply both layers subsequently, or consecutively. It's kind of like creating an API management layer, and a hybrid integration layer. Both go together, especially in data integration, or in application integration and cloud application integration.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We're a healthcare technology organization and that space has a great deal of integration work, so we use webMethods to help us manage and develop integration solutions for various healthcare-related needs. Those include HL7 messages, the new interop messages, the new CMS directives for data blocking, Affordable Care Act integrations, and integrations with other health systems.

Our particular product is a SaaS, multi-tenant environment that's on-prem but moving to cloud. It is used by hundreds of healthcare providers to run their businesses.

webMethods provides application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, APIs, and microservices. We use it for all of those purposes. Having that range of features in a single platform is very important, because that means we have a single platform to learn and use. It reduces training costs. It reduces overall infrastructure costs. It even makes hiring easier because we have one set of resources we need to hire for.

In a very fast moving space—which is weird to say about healthcare, but it has certainly become that in the last few years, and especially in the last year—the ability to move very quickly and to reuse components and to connect to almost anything have become pretty paramount. The solution’s adapters and connectors provide the fastest way to build an integration. The demand curve for integrations goes up daily, so our ability to perform and build integrations is a key core competency.

Because we use most of the platform, it's hard to call out a most valuable feature, but it's probably the ease of mapping which is the single largest feature. It gives us the ability to craft anything. A lot of single-purpose technologies, like Mirth, are good for healthcare messages, but we use webMethods not only for healthcare messages but for other business-related purposes, like integrations to Salesforce or integrations to Office 365. It's multi-purpose nature is very strong.

The ease of deploy and maintenance of integrations is a key element for us. If the strength is the mapping tool and the ability to change quickly, and having all of the components that we can then alter as we need to, the result is that it allows us to react very quickly to changing business demands. For example, we have a need to send the same types of data to many different integration partners, and because we're able to tailor the delivery to each endpoint, but use one master flow, it allows great economies of scale.

I'd like to see the admin portal for managing the integration server go up a level, to have more capabilities and to have a more modern web interface.

We've been using webMethods Integration Server for four or five years.

It has been very stable.

We find that it scales very well. It's a true enterprise tool.

Our usage will increase as our business grows. It's a core part of our infrastructure.

The tool is very good and we haven't really needed to engage with support enough to know if their support for the solution’s adapters and connectors brings long-term stability.

Support has been there in the couple of times we've needed them. We have gotten a fine response. They completely meet our expectations of support for an enterprise tool. But typically, there's no need for them.

We had a couple of competing platforms: Systems Integration from IBM, and MuleSoft in the open source world. We switched to webMethods for the support from the company and the range and depth of available adapters and connectors. It gave us more capabilities.

We used an integration partner to help us stand it up, so the setup didn't really impact us. We had a total of two or three people involved on our side. We used The Normandy Group and our experience with them was very positive.

It took us about three months to have the first integration running. The implementation strategy was 

• install tool
• get it to work
• build first integration.

Those same two people in our organization are the ones involved in the day-to-day maintenance of Integration Server. We have two webMethods technical resources who are responsible for about 400 integration points or integration services.

We have seen return on investment from using it. We have to compute that every year, and the value is always greater than the cost. It's just that every year it gets harder to justify that value against the competitors. 

Keeping in mind that we haven't explored the microservices completely, which has been a key element of their innovation recently, I do think webMethods is coming under increasing pressure when it comes to their price-to-feature value proposition. It's probably the single biggest strategic risk they have. They're very expensive in their industry. They've been raising the price recently, especially when compared with their competitors.

I'm familiar with Mirth, in the healthcare space, and IBM SI is still a very large tool. Various other IBM platforms that will do similar things. The space has gotten more crowded over the years.

The single biggest differences between webMethods and the other solutions are the range of the offering, the connectors, the stability of the system, the fact that it is an enterprise-grade system, and that you can basically do anything you need with it. 

The con is the fact that you are paying for the best-of-breed solution in the space, and the expense of it can be quite high. When you couple that with the fact that adding Software AG services increases the cost very fast, there is a real detriment to our adding additional Software AG offerings to the portfolio. The sheer expense makes us reluctant to do that. It's still justifying its cost for us, currently, but I feel that there are open source solutions that are charging up very fast. Also, finding resources who are trained in the tool is becoming increasingly hard as they become increasingly more in-demand.

It's a very valuable and a very powerful tool, but it's a tool that you have to dedicate resources to, to learn and to use well. Use an integration partner to help get it stood up and in use in your organization faster. That is something that is very valuable. And then dedicate staff to learn it. This isn't one more tool in the toolbox. This has to become someone's toolbox.

The comprehensiveness and depth of its connectors to packaged apps and custom apps is fairly low, but its ability to build what you need is very high. The value of the tool is the Lego block nature of it, so instead of being framed into set paths, we can build what we need.

I would rate it at seven out of 10. The cost-to-feature value is what brings that number down. The difficulty in finding webMethods-trained resources in North America also brings that number down. The powerful, scalable, stable nature of the offering brings that number up.

By Software AG, we are also using Integration Server, Trading Networks, Active Transfer, Optimize for Infrastructure, My webMethods, and their EDI package. As long as there is product parity between products, it makes sense to continue using multiple products from the same vendor. Obviously, you want to make sure you have a diverse portfolio. Where those products start breaking those links, you want to make sure that you are using the best product for your company in this region.

The fact that we were already using another solution from this vendor affected our decision to go with this particular product, mainly from a cost standpoint. As is any product in this region, the biggest cost is almost always the upfront cost of laying out the solution. Also, there are some costs in having that solution already available: between knowledge of the platform, having the licensing rights, and if you bring in a new solution, then you are now paying for two solutions.

The native integrations between the vendors' products are very seamless. The products interact very well. At times, it's kind of hard to tell where one product ends and the next one starts. As new products come in, the integrations probably take one or two updates before they are fully integrated. However, once products are fully integrated, it is very seamless and easy to hop between one product to another.

Using multiple products from the same vendor creates efficiencies:

1. In terms of knowledge. Obviously, there is a familiarity with the product and how you expect Software AG's products to act and respond. 
2. In terms of operational understanding between end users who are looking for specific data. They know how these products work and how to pull up these reports. 
3. In terms of having administrators overseeing these products.

There is a cost savings for using many of the same products. There are lower training costs. Also, typically, there are a lot of integrations that you ended up needing to build out, whether they be custom or out-of-the-box. Even if they are out-of-the-box, a lot of times that takes a lot of work to get those to work. However, since we are using Software AG products, it's very much like installing a plugin into an Excel program.

There was a reduction in the learning curve because we had already used the vendors' products. The products used work very similarly. In terms of verbiage, key aspects, or three-letter acronyms, you don't have to relearn any of those. There is an expectation of how these products will work. These products always work the same way when Software AG is rolling these types of products out.

We use webMethods Integration Server for two main aspects: 

1. For application-to-application integrations.
2. B2B: The transferring of on-premise data out to other business partners.

As with any integration platform, it is a single pane of glass that allows you to see and interact with transactions as they are flowing. Out-of-the-box, Software AG offers robust monitoring solutions to help you understand if a solution's up or down transactions aren't working, etc. The tool has been invaluable to our organization in terms of understanding where our data is, how it's flowing, and its current status.

Having a single hybrid-integration platform for all our needs is very important. From an IT perspective, it is a way for us to easily troubleshoot and quickly resolve issues. From a business perspective, it's very important because IT is readily available to assist with any system issues which are happening at that time. Anytime that you have applications talking to each other, it is a breeding ground for problems and issues. Having a solution like webMethods Integration Server in place can empower your IT department to be able to resolve issues and roll out solutions quickly as new applications come into your portfolio.

We have been on webMethods Integration Server for 15 years. We just got rid of our mainframe. It works wonders with our mainframe. With SaaS and cloud applications, webMethods Integration Server does not answer this need by itself. This is where you would be looking for APIs or custom plugins to work with those types of solutions. 

It is very open. It is extremely rare for us to find something that we are trying to integrate, but we can't integrate it. In the past seven years, I don't think that has ever happened. For any problem that we are looking at, the Software AG solution can solve. That has probably been the most valuable feature.

Application integrations are offered out-of-the-box, and that is extremely important to us. This is one of the main use cases that we have for it. It is about 60 to 70 percent of the workload in our application today.

Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is probably the future and direction that many companies and organizations are looking at. Software AG is also rolling out robust solutions for this. So, if I was a brand new customer, that is where I would be looking. This is also the direction that I think Software AG is moving into along with almost every vendor in the industry. However, the integration platform, as it currently sits, runs really well. It's very robust and does what you would expect it to do.

My organization moved onto the webMethods platform 15 years ago. I have been using it for the past seven years.

Software AG is a partner who has been around for many years. The company is not going anywhere. Regarding the solution, you can get the capabilities that you need out of it.  It is a known solution that works really well and does exactly what you would expect it to do.

Software AG's full support for the solution’s adapters and connectors brings long-term stability to our services and integrations. Software AG has many SMEs in each region, both globally and in each product type. Being able to have access to a subject-matter expert in the specific tool or region that I'm looking for is invaluable. I feel like I am talking to someone who has hands-on experience in either developing the solution or has many years of experience with the product or similar customers. They also have people who just work in specific business groups. For example, if I'm looking for a knowledge worker to do something with IoT, then they have people ready who can answer specific questions about products that we might be looking to integrate with.

The solution is very scalable. If you want more webMethod Integration Servers, it is very easy to spin them up. It's very easy to apply packages to each one of those solutions. Or, if you want to just have one large webMethods Integration Server, it is easy to create the configuration settings to allow that JVM to have more memory.

There are less than 20 users. A solution like this is normally a back-end solution. Obviously, we have administrators who are overseeing the product to make sure it's up, patched, available, and secure. Developers who are rolling out new solutions and debugging any issues going on in production or lower environments. Then, the third group is probably the business users. That is a very small hand full of users at our company. Those users are typically looking just to make sure that the data is flowing as they would expect. For example, I expect a certain file to go out to this customer every day. That business user has access to log into the application and pull that file.

The product is used extensively at my organization. Out of all our integrations, it probably counts for 60 to 70 percent. Every minute of every day, it's being used. I think the usage that we have in place today is correct. If we were to expand any further, we would probably be looking at iPaaS solutions.

Their technical support is very good. I have never had any issues with the support or getting the resources that I need.

Two months ago, Software AG did have a data breach, so their support desk got shut down. It has been down since then, and that has not been a pleasant experience. Prior to that, it was a pleasant experience. I think Software AG has been reeling from that, but there are ways to get a hold of their support desk. This ensures that their customers still have access to support, which has been available and out there. However, they did have a public exposure, which has ended up causing some loopholes for their customers.

Upgrades are complex. They typically take about five months from start to finish. There are many packages that plug into webMethods Integration Server, which is the central point for a vast majority of the transactions at my organization. Anytime we are upgrading that, there are complexities within each component that we must understand. That makes any upgrade very cumbersome and complicated. That has been my experience at this company. Because there are many different business units that we are touching, there are so many different components that we are touching. The amount of READMEs that you have to go through takes some time.

This is where we would need to look at an iPaaS solution or moving to work with microservices solutions. Obviously, the smaller you make the solution, the more you're able to in an agile fashion.

From a high-level implementation strategy, we do a waterfall approach. That is the approach that we have ended up following for upgrading this solution.

Deploying solutions is very easy. The biggest thing that any company has to look at, because we have had a couple of pitfalls in this, is you have to look at how you're rolling your solution out. So, if you end up stacking or creating common services in the solution, those solutions become very tricky as they start to age, as any development cycle would end up having. The smaller you create the solution, the easier it is to keep rolling out those solutions, and staying away from common services really allows you to continue to roll out with ease.

As new solutions roll out or there is a different way for these apps to integrate, it has been fairly easy for developers to make the modified changes needed. The biggest thing is always knowledge because there have been some integrations that haven't been touched for 15 years. Then, if someone needs to touch one of those integrations, there is a learning curve in understanding how that integration works and what they are looking at.

Having a product like this is invaluable to any company in terms of the amount of time that IT gets to save in terms of integrating different products as well as having an open way to ensure that these applications are working. If you were to do this out of the box for each one of those solutions, while the upfront costs would be cheaper, the long-term stability of your applications would definitely degrade. As you are rolling this out for products that probably run your business, that's probably not a direction that any long-term company would want to go. I know my organization has seen time savings from not going with in-house built integrations from app to app.

For the B2B, we are probably saving somewhere between five to 10 full-time resources who would be working on this manually. For application-to-application, it probably has cut down 50 percent of our downtimes at a minimum. When you're talking about application-to-application integration, that is the thing that you would probably end up using as a key metric. For the amount of downtime that we have, I would double the amount or length of downtime that we would have if we didn't have this solution.

Currently, the licensing solution for this product is pretty straightforward. The way that Software AG has moved in their licensing agreements is very understandable. It is very easy for you to see where things land. Like most vendors today, they are transaction based. Therefore, just having a good understanding of how many transactions that you are doing a year would be very wise. Luckily, there are opportunities to work with the vendor to get a good understanding of how many transactions you have and what is the right limit for you to fall under.

With any solution like this, on day one you have a project that you're trying to work on, but just understand where you are trying to go with the solution. Some plugins are cheaper than others, and others are more expensive than others. Just make sure that you understand the full scope of what you might end up using the product for, so you can understand the all-in costs.

The tool works extremely well. Software AG offers packaged solutions for many packaged apps. Oracle SQL Server or Salesforce are add-ons that you can purchase and install easily for plug and play with packaged solutions. When you start moving into custom applications, there are no packaged solutions. The good news is that typically custom apps are built in some type of known technology, and that technology can easily be integrated into webMethods Integration Servers.

Business-to-business communications is an add-on that needs to be purchased. While super important to my organization, it is an add-on outside of the standard webMethods Integration Server. I would strongly recommend the business-to-business add-ons, especially if you're looking to use webMethods Integration Server in that capacity. It just makes the development cycles a lot shorter as well as making it much easier to manage your business profiles.

We routinely evaluate other options. I wasn't here when we made the decision to move onto this solution, but we periodically reassessed the platform to see if we are still sitting on the best solution that is matched to our corporation.

Today, there are many newer solutions out in the marketplace, and Software AG does offer those solutions. That is a great start. If I was starting over, I might look at those alternative solutions. However, if you are an alternative solution to webMethods Integration Server (not Software AG), then I would probably be looking a lot more into the cloud. webMethods Integration Server is used in a very legacy way. For example, we are on premise with data centers, which are legacy ways to solve a problem. If my solutions were in the cloud, then I would probably be looking at webMethods Integration Cloud as Software AG offers it, or any of the other vendors, like MuleSoft. So, you have to look at:

• What am I trying to integrate today? 
• Where are those solutions sitting? 
• If everything is on-prem and you are a 110-year-old company with 50 plants across the place, then probably having an on-prem is the right solution.
• If you are an eCommerce shop, then you are probably looking more in the cloud and for a cloud solution.

The solution pays for itself, but it is complicated as it stands today. Make sure that you are using it for exactly what you have architected it for. Don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

We have been moving away from data integration for webMethods Integration Server. So, it's becoming less of a priority for us.

Software AG has been moving in the direction of trying to make their tool as modern as possible. It has plugins for Docker today as well as ways to integrate into webMethods Integration Cloud. While these integrations are available, we don't use them.

I would rate webMethods Integration Server as a seven (out of 10). For what the solution can do, it does it extremely well. The upgrades are very cumbersome; they are very long and disruptive. You have to do them at least every three years. It's not a fun time for any company. If upgrades were a 100 times easier, it would get a much higher score.

Our use case is our service-oriented architecture transformation which started in 2017. It has been a three-year journey. Before that, between 2007 and 2017, we had not conducted a re-architecting of the SOA. In 2017, we had a big initiative for digital transformation at the bank to make ourselves more flexible, more agile, and competitive with all the startups and the financial industry in general, not only in Indonesia but also in other regions.

One of the critical capabilities included the integration area. That is why, in 2017, we re-architected the SOA to have layered architecture that is related closely to microservices. We are testing a new mobile banking channel to use a micro services architecture as well.

The integration use cases for webMethods involve connecting all of the back-end core systems at the bank so that they use the SOA integration server layer. Everything must go through this layer to speak or communicate with the back-end systems, such as the core banking, HR systems, and the treasury system; all the core systems that sit behind the ESB layer of the Integration Server. All the front-end systems like mobile banking, sales management, the CRM, etc., must go through this ESB layer, the integration server, to communicate with the back-end system. That is the prime use case of Integration Server.

Other than that, we successfully launched a new initiative for API about a year ago. We are commoditizing our financial services to not only be consumed by our channels, but by partners such as startups, FinTechs, InsureTechs, and other companies that would like to partner with us and use our financial services APIs.

When it comes to commoditizing for external parties, the partners, the other banks, or financial institutions that are our subsidiaries, they can connect to it and consume our services through the API Gateway products that we are providing to them. That includes sandboxing to test their applications. If they would like to partner with us, they need to register themselves and make an agreement with the bank regarding what sort of packages and fees that will be applied for the cooperation.

It's deployed on-prem. We are a banking institution. In Asia, regulators for the financial industry prohibit us from hosting financial transactions outside the Indonesian region.

Are you using multiple products from this vendor?

We are using multiple products to build the end state of our service-oriented architecture (SOA). This is all orchestrated as a big building house. Those SOAs have many capabilities inside of them on the integration side, such as webMethods Integration Server. There is also webMethods API Gateway and Software AG Apama. (Read my webMethods API Gateway review here.) Those modules inside of Software AG complement the building blocks of SOA.

We also use it to complement other products in the markets outside Software AG, such as Kafka as well as all event processing and streaming. This is in combination with the capabilities (and beyond) of what Software AG stacks can do.

I find the native integrations between Software AG products to be very useful from a plain vanilla standpoint. Though, when we implement native integrations, there needs to be slight customizations to fit them into our core legacy system, and that needs to be integrated with other systems. For plain vanilla capabilities, it is sufficient enough.

The native integrations between Software AG products also have good performance in terms of transactions per second (TPS). These are acceptable in terms of the volume and speediness of a transaction that we can produce as well as being combined with the efficiency of using the hardware, memory, and CPUs.

If you combine the commodity hardware and performance as well as the plain vanilla capabilities of internal products that Software AG has, then there is a good price per value.

It gives you a one-stop service for your integrations area. You can really rely on one vendor, then you don't have to worry about sustainability or support. This is all guaranteed by Software AG as a single stop service from them. Whereas, when you need to combine other vendors, then you need to monitor each of their solutions, sustainability, product roadmaps, etc. Then, this becomes your technology liabilities, which is something that we consider. From the integration, we are selecting a good strategic partnership with one vendor in order to maximize our productivity. Thus, we don't have to worry how we can monitor each respective vendor if we do a best of breed combination of many vendors, just to do an integration.

By selecting Software AG and using multiple products, this saved us about 72 percent, which has definitely given us more agility.

Because we were already accustomed with webMethods Integration Server way before the webMethods API Gateway, they were almost the same. We just converted our knowledge from the prior WSDL into RESTful JSON standard messages. Therefore, the learning curve was very smooth because the environment that the developers use was still the same: My webMethods Console. It uses the IDEs coming from that, saving us a lot of time with the learning curve on new technologies.

One of the improvements is that everything is currently standardized. Previously, each system had its own connection to the core and back-end systems, a point-to-point connection. It created havoc for governance of the integration itself. There were so many connections without any governance whatsoever as to how the communication happened.;

There is also an improvement on our development side. When we have requests for new business requirements, products, business processes, and integrations with partners, Integration Server has dramatically decreased our development time. That's because we have standardized all the communications to the core system in one place.

In addition, we have improved availability of the channel itself.

It definitely gives us flexibility. The first stage, with these products, is the learning and customization. Once these are underway and things run, the performance is meeting our expectations. And when new requirements arise it becomes easier and development speeds up. For each integration service, the development cycle has come down from seven days to three days, maximum. And that's for the complex integrations. We have cut the development cycle by almost 50 percent.

Modifying and redeploying integrations is very easy. It gives us a good, stable, comprehensive, end-to-end development cycle, from development to deployment. It gives us a set of tools for checking the consistency and integrity of the code, which is something we didn't have with previous solutions. When deploying to the production server, it also does validation checking, whether certain libraries are missing, for example. It helps us do consistency checks. Because of that, we have cut down the system integration testing significantly. The user acceptance testing has also been reduced significantly. The reduction in testing time is almost 50 percent, compared to our previous solution. We used to test for five days and now it's just two days of testing for each of the services.

The vendor’s full support for the solution’s adapters and connectors has helped with uptime and availability. We are close to 24/7. And the number of transactions per second, previously, was around 600 to 700. Now, it has almost doubled. We are reaching more than 1,000 TPS. We have more than 2 million transactions. It has given us that type of scalability.

The solution has helped us contribute more to the business, to the expansion of the products and the volume of transactions.

There are three features of Integration Server that are the most valuable. One is the webMethods Designer. That helps our developers develop on their own. It's very intuitive for design. It helps our developers to speed the development of services for the integrations.

The second feature is the reliability. Mandiri Bank is the largest bank in Indonesia. That translates it into a humongous volume of transactions that flow down from the channels and go through the Integration Server, and then to the core banking itself. The components of Integration Server need to have 99.999 availability. It needs to be reliable all the time, available, and to be a scalable platform.

The third of the highlights of the features of Integration Server is the small footprint for infrastructure. It can run on any commodity hardware, unlike other solutions that need to run on specific hardware. It gives us the freedom to scale the platforms and create the greatest possible agility for the organization to expand, based on the demands. The other side effect of that is the additional advantage of transforming the architecture that we currently use into more of a microservices base. It gives us more flexibility and agility, going forward.

We would like to achieve a multi-site, soft data center. Multi-site meaning that we would like to have more than two Active-Active data centers because Indonesia is a big region with three time zones. We would like to have many data centers serve us across the islands to support the massive number of transactions. We need to have a good amount of availability. Hence, we would like to have a multi-site data center. To support that, the solution needs to be capable of Active-Active implementations, an Active-Active integration server. We would like to get to the point where transactions are not only coming into one data center but, simultaneously, could be redirected to several other data center sites. Integration Server needs the capabilities to help us to achieve that goal.

Also, the solution has big instances when deployed under microservices or in a containerized platform. They need to improve that so that it is competitive with other integration solutions, like Redis and Kafka. Deployments under microservices with those solutions are much more lightweight, in the size of the runtime itself, compared with Software AG. They need to improve it to be scalable enough and lightweight enough to run on the microservices/containerized platform.

We are paying them a lot so we have access to their product development engineers. We are waiting for them to revamp the microservices areas. We are waiting for the new version of that. They have come back to us with something that is much more lightweight, but to us, it has still not reached the lightweight level that we want.

We have several products from Software AG. The product is the SOA webMethods Enterprise Service Bus. We have been using that since 2007. The second, and one of the largest, is the API Gateway. Other products include Apama Complex Event Processing and Event Stream Processing engine. Those are the three main products we are currently using as part of the service oriented architecture building-blocks at Bank Mandiri.

Given that we have been using it all these years, you can imagine the stability of the system.

We experienced major issues at the beginning of the implementation when the product was still kind of new. But over the years they improved a lot. 

They keep producing new versions at a rate that we cannot keep up with. That is a problem for us because they have a very small set of supported versions. That is a downside of their products. Old versions are supported for a very limited time. They keep telling  us, "You need to upgrade." But we do an upgrade and they introduce a new version and the one we updated to is already obsolete. Their life cycle is very short.

It can run on commodity hardware, so it is scalable using commodity hardware, like Intel processors of any brand, as long they run on the Linux operating system. They can do a clusterized environment and scale easily when transaction volume is bigger than we expect. It can actually scale on demand, and it's easy to set up by joining a new cluster into an existing cluster. It performs well in this case.

We have 60,000 to 70,000 employees at the bank. About 10,000 people are using the services we create with the solution. They are mostly in the transaction back office and they monitor the day-to-day transactions from the channels. They monitor our mobile banking, trade, finance, and treasury transactions, as well as wealth management, corporate payments, and cash management. It's typically the wholesale, retail, and the micro-banking staff who heavily use this integration. For the back office, the upper-level user is a department head, while the junior level is staff that does the monitoring, day in and day out.

When we have issues that we have not encountered, we have access to their support teams. They need to have support which is close to the Asian region. Because of the time zones there are limitations on how they respond to our support. 

They do provide us with local partners that help us more quickly. There are several severity levels of support. For level-one they provide us with good partners in Indonesia.

Since we do the transformations, we do the initial setup from the bare metal server up to the setting up of the Integration Server. We can pretty much do that ourselves, with their guides. The first time, we needed to be guided by their engineers. The setup is fairly easy, but for optimal speed and performance, we definitely reach out to their support to evaluate the configurations that we have deployed.

When we installed the new version it took two or three days, depending on how many nodes we configured. Now, it takes a maximum of one day to establish a setup for normal configurations. For the complex ones, that have many nodes or Active-Active sites, it can take three or four days.

We have one engineer for Software AG, another on the network team, and another on the server team.

For the monitoring of day-to-day operations, we have support from our internal developers. We have deployed six or seven people because this is a huge implementation of Integration Server. They cover three shifts so that we have 24/7 monitoring, using the management console. We accompany that with third-party tools that help us to monitor the performance.

We have been using the solution's adapters and connectors for our new architecture on the integration inside of Integration Server, but with help. The product is a plain vanilla platform. You can do pretty much everything, but to exploit its capabilities, you need to use their consulting to help develop and utilize them. Those capabilities are something that our internal developer was not familiar with, so we needed to engage with the Software AG engineers to help us build those adapters. The built-in adapters do not suffice because they need customization to be implemented. Each organization has its own business processes and logic that differ from one to the next. It is good as a plain vanilla, but if you want to customize it further and exploit the capabilities, you need to have their engineers working closely with you to implement and utilize all of the capabilities. 

Our back-end is a legacy system that uses a different language, so we needed to customize it. The solution helped reduce the amount of work because at least the features were already there, but it needed the customization of the engineers from Software AG in conjunction with our internal developers as the experts in our core system. Combine forces and you create your own adapters.

Integration Server provides application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, APIs, and microservices. Regarding the data adapters, we are not using their products for data integrations. The data integration space has come into the data warehouse area, and we are using other tools to do data integration. But for the transaction APIs, business processes, we are using built-in products from webMethods.

That range of features comes back to the use cases that apply to the business innovations that a business would like to implement, such as real-time transactions, asynchronous transactions, fire-and-forget. I'm sure the transactions will be successfully processed by our core systems, and that is the main goal. The other features go towards how we can enrich things, but that is a second priority. 

We use the solution for application-to-application integration and B2B integration.

The synchronous and asynchronous messaging system the solution provides is very good.

Other products have been using AI and cloud enhancements, but webMethods Integration Server is still lagging in that key area. It's very good as a standalone integration server, but it has to come up with more features in the cloud.

The solution's API management is slightly lagging, and its API policies could be improved.

I have been using webMethods Integration Server for 13 years.

I rate the solution a six out of ten for stability.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is easy for an experienced person, but a new person may find it difficult to set up everything. There are too many features and components. The setup could be easier if the solution could merge everything in one suit.

The solution’s pricing is too high.

The solution has impacted our system's scalability and ability because it is quite good and pretty fast.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The tool helps with the integration between multiple entities at the same time.

webMethods Integration Server needs to add more adapters. 

The product is very stable. 

webMethods Integration Server is scalable. We use it daily. 

webMethods Integration Server's setup was straightforward. The tool's deployment took one to two hours to complete. 

I would rate webMethods Integration Server an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution in the API gateway services. 

I like the tool's scalability. 

webMethods.io Integration's installation is complex. It should also improve integration and connectors. 

I have been working with the solution for more than ten years. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

I have used Apigee before webMethods.io Integration. 

The installation took about four to six weeks to complete. You don't need a big team to handle the deployment. We relied on one system architect to handle it. The tool's maintenance is also not difficult. 

webMethods.io Integration's pricing is high and has yearly subscription costs.  

This solution suits enterprises and I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for logistic purposes.

The solution's most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with various servers.

The solution could be more user-friendly. They should include proper documentation for easy understanding.

We have ten solution users in our company. It has good scalability. We plan to increase its usage.

The solution's customer service is good. We have support access. Thus, we write to them for the service request in case of any issues.

The complexity of the solution's initial setup process depends on the environment and specific project requirements.

We purchase a yearly basis license for the solution. I rate its pricing an eight. It is not that expensive. The price depends on the use cases, support, and resources for implementation.

It is a good solution. Also, it is easy to use compared to other integration solutions like Azure, SAP, etc. It has the highest resolution and is more secure as well. I rate it a nine.