What is our primary use case?
For the B2B gateway, we are exposing a few APIs and those are exposed as APIs, and the messaging format that we use is ebXMLs. Basically, we have a lot of our consumers coming onto the B2B gateway, posting orders.
For my integration, I am very new to the product, so I'm not aware of other scenarios, but for my use case, we use ebXMLs. ebXMLs are not normal XML or SOAP XML messages. They are signed XMLs in which you also have a few certificate details and other things. That messaging standard is currently supported by Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration and also by Oracle SOA Suite. We do not have enough products in the market, so Axway is one of them which is supporting ebXMLs. That's the reason why we are working on it.
Since we use it more for business-to-business communications, we use it to onboard a lot of our communication providers onto our platform so that we will check various functionalities. For example, if you consider your internet connection at home, we use it to check faults in the line, check the availability of whether your area is serviceable or not. All of that information we check. We provide services to a lot of our communication partners like Vodafone, TalkTalk, and Sky. They connect to our B2B gateway and we call them dialogue services. They connect to our dialogue services as ebXML APIs and then they do the further checks, whatever if they need any serviceability, whether that area is serviceable or not, do we have enough connectivity, what is the bandwidth that we can provide in that area. All these checks we do. Generally, all business-to-business calls occur. There is no individual intervention here.
What is most valuable?
Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration is good. We have used various functionalities of a forwarder. We terminate the SSL connections at the entry point of the gateway. We use it as an SSL termination product as well, basically for mutual TLS because we exchange certificates and consumers come and connect to us over mutual TLS with the certificate exchange. We use it as an SSL termination tool as well. So that's how we have been using it.
It is very useful. We use the inbuilt functionalities of Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration for our analysis and to identify the point of failures. Additionally, we also dump our logs into Splunk and we also rely on external kinds of monitoring tools.
What needs improvement?
Basically, what happens is that during the initial boot-up of the product upon installation, we do face some hiccups because of the DB connectivity. That is a major issue in which initially the console doesn't load properly. This is the initial part. Although during transactions, we have not faced any issues. But here and there, those internal DBs which will be storing all those configurations are impacted sometimes.
It is the process of integration with the DB and the loading up of the console, which is something we found difficult. That is one thing. Another thing which we found is that we were running a migration project from Oracle onto Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration. In that migration project, we found that we wanted to modify a few headers. That is something which is not available out-of-the-box. We had to write some custom coding. That's the reason why we had to take help from Axway Professional Services. Configurations or customizations is something which is not very easy. We have to go through a lot of assistance from Axway support team, their product support team, to get those custom logics implemented here. These were header conversions, basically upper case to lower case header conversions.
It is a little complex because as I said, we do certificate installations. Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration doesn't have a trust store or certificate store which will hold all the certificates. This is not the same, because as I said, we were migrating from Oracle. Oracle was having a trust store. Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration was not having a trust store. Somehow mapping that was kind of difficult for us to set it up initially.
We are satisfied with the functionality part. Performance is also not an issue. Sometimes we do face some issues loading up and with customizations.
For how long have I used the solution?
For the last one year, I have been working with Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Although we are not using them, the feature is very helpful. What we do is that we just pass on those requests into our downstream ESB systems, Enterprise Service Buses for integration. They pass the request from meaningful XMLs and give acknowledgements and other things, and integrate to various other downstream systems. But we have not integrated it into any ERP system.
How are customer service and support?
The model, since we are using other products of Axway as well, it's not a pay-per-use, it's a per-transaction model which we are using. It's per transaction that Axway is billing us. Ours is a different pricing model where, as I said, it's per transaction, and that model is clubbed along with our Axway API Gateway as well. That way, we are getting a few leeways.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Currently, we were using Oracle SOA Suite, and Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration also satisfies the product. It has almost 95% plus, I think 95 to 100% of the features of the products offered in the market are available with Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration. Basically, whatever Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration is offering is up to the market standards and up to the requirements of the customers.
What other advice do I have?
We do work on Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration as well, as I mentioned, I already left a review three months ago about Axway API Management.
We have a separate product called Axway API Gateway, which we use for API Management. An interesting fact is that we are also running a program to migrate all those legacy ebXMLs onto our Axway API Management gateway because as I said, ebXMLs is not a very popular messaging standard. We are going to expose these, basically APIs on Axway AMPLIFY B2B Integration as REST APIs on Axway. That migration will also undergo. It is in progress, but not fully live.
We are the users of the product and we are using a per-transaction based model. My overall rating for this product is 9 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other