webMethods.io Reviews

CentraSite for governance and life cycle management. It frankly fills the gap between IT and business by having approval and policy enforcement on each state and cycle of the asset from the moment it gets created until it is retired.

It becomes the only integration platform through which any external/internal data exchange does any web services. Below are more details:

• There are many projects in the organization which need data from external entities and all integration endpoints implemented using webMethods integration platform.
• Departments in the organization currently understand what to exchange and in what type by having an enterprise data model in webMethods integration platform.
• Business users are involved in any integration as approvals have to take place throughout the lifecycle of the service.
• Reports and dashboards give management a big picture of the integration usage and potential bottlenecks.

Rapid application development has to be considered, especially for UI, where user interference is crucial.

Eight years using the following different product versions:

• webMethods API Management platform – CentraSite, Mediator, API Portal, API Gateway
• webMethods Integration Server
• webMethods Universal Messaging
• Terracotta In-Memory
• webMethods Business Process Management
• webMethods Optimize for Process

No.

No.

Good as long the support request is clear and justified.

Yes, Adobe LiveCycle ES4. Adobe LiveCycle is superior when it comes to UI and process development, whereas, the integration capabilities are less compared to webMethods.

Complex. Lots of configuration parameters have to be set to guarantee a solid platform. Some of these parameters are not mentioned in the product documentation!

Always plan five years ahead and don’t jeopardize the quality of your project by dropping items from the bill of materials.

No.

• Requirements for API life cycle model should be gathered carefully.
• Consider SOA governance and don’t impose lots of policies that restrict the visibility of assets/services.
• Always consider an enterprise data model for service integration and business processes.
• Define potential KPIs for process optimization during the process definition phase, not during the implementation.
• Consider In-Memory while clustering the servers and developing services.
• Consider an asynchronous integration pattern to guarantee the delivery.

Segregation of deployment for the environments is the most valuable feature of the solution.

The product must improve the performance of Designer. The product must add more compatible connectors. The solution should provide more customization options.

I have been using the solution for about ten years.

I rate the solution’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Seven users are using the solution in our organization.

The technical support team is not so good.

Neutral

The initial setup is not difficult for me. I rate the ease of setup a seven or eight out of ten.

The deployment process took around two weeks. We need a team of seven people to deploy the solution.

I rate the pricing a nine out of ten. The product is expensive.

I am using the latest version of the solution. My advice to product users depends on their organization's scale. If an organization is a medium to large enterprise, I would recommend the solution to them. If the organization is small, it should consider other solutions in the market. Overall, I rate the product a nine 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.

We use it mainly for policy implementation and securitization when we're exposed outside the internet.

They should develop clear visibility for the onboarding. They could also improve the clustering.

We have been using this solution for three years.

it is a stable solution.

It is scalable and can adapt to third-party integration. We have more than 500 users.

I've worked with MuleSoft, and webMethods API Gateway is the most stabilized tool with a robust integration server. It's a good tool, and it has a stable messaging broker. In addition, from the infra point of view, it is always compliant and not complex. You can integrate everything with webMethods API Gateway.

The initial setup was straightforward and not complex. I rate the setup an eight out of ten.

I do not have details about the pricing. However, it is cheaper than APG.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Having experience with various EAI and ESB tools like Oracle Service Bus (former BEA Aqualogic) and Webmethods summary would be that everything can be done with any technology.

However the difference may be the time needed in order to implement the same integration features based on the existing product features.

From my point of view a good EAI and ESB solution needs to have what Webmethods offers

• a layer on top to isolate developers from the J2EE implementation ie to avoid implementing integration services in pure Java as if you were just coding the integration in Java
• Provides needed adapters yes, but with an intuitive front end that allows you to configure and use them (e.g setup number of retries for transient connectivity errors) rather than program in Java to implement calls to use the adapters
• A platform that allows continuous integration with a deployment engine and dependencies (and their changes) resolved and centralized in the server as a repository.

Some features reviewed

• Unit testing & Debugging capabilities: Webmethods allows you to debug your services in a step by step mode with variable watchers whereas in other programming oriented EAI solutions the testing in not dynamic and we can only rely in SOAPUI executions and reviewing returned XMLs and logs. From my point of view this is a decision driver.
• Data Mapping capabilities and XML management: In Webmethods you don’t need to work with XML parsing (if you don’t really want to) and data mapping and transformation is natural and based on UI drag&drop capabilities (No need to use XQuery or XPath if not needed). In webmethods you work with the Pipeline concept and needed transformations using a GUI designer. Canonical document transformations can be created fairly simple. Document structure/schemas are centralized in the server repository so there are no discrepancies when a document structure changes. If a document structure changes all services using that document get automatically updated. I still recall how complicated it was to manage XML transformations, parsing and schema dependencies within other EAI packages. Mapping was basically relying again on coding, XSLT transformation and library dependencies.
• In other solutions, basic tasks (like setting up a DB connection and test that) should not start a huge discussion troubleshoot thread leading the developer to spend most of his time troubleshooting and discussing about technical issues e.g not why he/she cannot connect to the database.
• Deployment and code changes: Webmethods has a central repository where an app dev resource is locking a given resource. Until that resource is unlocked nobody else can work on that item. Once a component is changed there is no deployment, changes are already in that environment. Once the code has been changed and unit tested migrating this to the next environment is a matter of a couple of clicks (no need to restart the server or wait minutes before you can see the changes). This helps having a system that allows maintaining continuous integration.
• Audit and logs: This is natural and simple in Webmethods, you can flag any service to be audited in their log database (on success and/or errors, when the service starts, exits, including parameters or not). You don’t need to have any extra coding for that. You can then use those logs to run your reports in SQLServer.
• Small features that help speeding up development, just as an example: commenting steps in an integration process is fairly simple in Webmethods while in other EAI solutions is a nightmare or impossible.

We used webmethods in an EAI project to integrate transactions from a bespoken HR Portal (e.g bank details change, new hire, salary increase, etc...) to update two different customer ERP systems in the back-end (SAP HR and PeopleSoft) thus providing self service capabilities to end users and reducing the need for manual data entry by agents (prone to errors and systems not being synchronized)

At least in SAG Webmethods 8 there was no Data Value Repository tool that would allow to map values/codes from source (in our case HR portal) and transform that into target ERP codes (SAP and PeopleSoft)

We therefore had to create our own solution and make calls at runtime to that repository (we called it Value List Repository or VLR for short) to resolve correct values in target.

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. 

In the API gateway, there is a new feature that allows us to filter logs within a payload. This has been a useful feature.

The configuring of the JWT token would be improved as it is a confusing process. We require more information on this part of the solution. 

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. 

 The pricing of this solution is reasonable. 

This solution is flexible and can be used across a number of projects. I have used it for banking and retail. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

The Software AG Designer has been great. It's very intuitive.

The development tools need to be improved. They aren't very effective for us to use as the requirement to use the Software AG Designer is quite big. Sometimes our developer doesn't have a really high-end spec laptop or desktop computer. They sometimes have trouble opening the Software AG Designer to develop something.

The Software AG Designer could be more memory-efficient or CPU-efficient so that we can use it with middle-spec hardware. That would be a great improvement for us in development.

For a new user, the initial setup is hard. 

The quality of the message queuing could be improved. In webMethods they have something called Universal Messaging. Future modules could be included in the Integration Server for different queuing. Currently, they have the basic queuing for messaging. Maybe in the future, they can have built-in different priority queuing to make it a lot faster.

I've been using the solution for about three months. It hasn't been that long just yet.

We are still in development and trial. We didn't reach the point of production where we could really gauge its reliability and therefore we didn't really know how stable it is. We're still in the early stages.

We used to use Red Hat, however, I was not fully in charge of that Red Hat project. I can't speak to any particulars. We didn't really switch. It was a requirement from the existing client to use webMethods as they already had webMethods since version 9.5 and wanted to continue with it.

The initial setup is hard for an early learner like me. It's quite difficult as we were presented with too many features and we didn't really know what was going to be installed.

For example, when we tried to install Integration servers, we had so many other features that needed to be installed, and we don't really know what that was about. By the time we try to install, we forgot to install some other items, such as JDBC for the database. At that point, we needed to install it again. Overall, it's kind of hard for us to use the initial setup.

I'm not really familiar with the commercial side. I don't really know about pricing as I'm only on the operations side.

I'm only a vendor for the customer that already has this operating.

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