IBM Integration Bus Reviews

It is used to enable communication between applications. For example, when application A needs to interact with application B, IBM Integration Bus provides a kind of bridge that helps application A to communicate with application B in terms of messaging. Application A might be using a specific format, such as XML, which needs to be converted into the format understood by application B. IBM Integration Bus takes care of this transformation and routing of messages from application A to application B. I have seen IIB been used in the banking, payments, and finance domains.

It makes the communication between multiple and heterogeneous applications so easy. We can bring together different messages and applications from different platforms and connect them through IBM Integration Bus.

They need to come up with Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). It should also have a feature for integrating with those applications that are on the cloud.

I have been using this solution for the past four years.

It is stable. There are plenty of projects that have been using this tool. My friends or my ex-colleagues who have moved to other organizations also find it good.

I don't have an insight into the scalability as such, but based on the meetings related to the maintenance of the application, I did not come across any scalability-related issues.

There were a couple of instances when my team approached them, and there was a good response from the IBM team. There were some delays, but that happened almost three to four years ago. Their support might have improved recently.

It is quite straightforward. For our project, we do have different needs. We build artifacts that are ready to be deployed. These artifacts need to be placed in a specific folder or directory. They are then picked up and deployed in the servers. It is quite automated these days.

Its deployment is quick. It is a matter of seconds.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for data integration. We have different kinds of information such as file feeds, messages, and inbound software that need to be confirmed and delivered to the platform of our clients as a message.

We have benefited by using this solution from the IAB, we have been able to use different delivery types.

I have found the inbound and outbound adapter confirmations valuable.

The tracing and debugging features are not up to date with more modern technology available.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

The solution has been stable.

The scalability has been excellent.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did the implementation through our in-house team and it took approximately one day to complete.

The price of the license could be cheaper.

I rate IBM Integration Bus a seven out of ten.

We are using the solution as an outer layer for all of our API calls we are making outside of our own devices. All APIs integrations are routing through the ESB only. We are using it for IIB server components and the DataPower, which is an API gateway. It is providing us with a security layer because all the outside calls do not have direct communication with our own server, this middle layer is called the ESB. 

The solution has helped my organization because any new integration coming to my backend system, we can easily implement it in a shorter time. This is because the middle layer takes care of all API language conversions or the code conversion, and also does the maintaining of the logs.

Having the solution come from IBM you know you are receiving a product of quality in components and in the services, it is very good.

I do not think there are any improvement areas because it depends on what exactly the use case for this ESB is. Some organizations are having a lot of integration and they will choose a regular ESB. While others will choose the security purpose route, making an extra layer. It depends from organization to organization, to determine how this solution can be improved from their specific use cases. Otherwise, I think that there are not any relevant improvement areas to give.

I used the solution in my last company for a long while.

The solution came to the market a long while ago, it has had time to mature. It is really stable and large organizations can rely on it. Smaller companies could too but it is too expensive.

It is a scalable solution. You can have any number of integration, it depends on the server and how much space you are providing to the IIB servers. We plan to have more than 50 wired integration by the end of the year.

The installation is not easy. You need experts who know how to install this IIB. The common technician will not have the knowledge to do it. You will need assistance installing the solution even though on IBM's website you can download the complete user manual explaining how to install the IIB servers. 

We used a third-party vendor, who help us install the solution and it was not easy. If you have most things in place at the site the whole installation process can take approximately three days. 

To do the complete deployment you will need at least one architecture that understands this IIB solution. It all depends on what kind of IP division architecture you have. Based on the project's scope, you then can define your team. There is no certain number of how many team members is required. It depends on your project, how large it is, and based on that you can decide how much manpower is required.

The solution requires a license and is very expensive here in India. Large organizations will be able to afford it but smaller companies will have a difficult time paying for the solution at the current price.

I am going to continue to use this solution, when you purchase this solution you have spent a lot of money, you have to continue to use it to make a return on investment.

I would recommend this solution if they have a large budget.

I rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten.

I'm responsible for Strategy and Architecture for an IT consulting company they are partners with IBM. 

I like that this solution is suitable for any size company. It's simple to use from a development perspective because the content is easily infiltrated in the eclipse infrastructure. It's also credible in all the application aspects and easy to integrate into the enterprise application landscape. Finally, there is also a good relationship with IBM itself that assists us in implementing. You can really use this architecture but you have to understand the technology itself. It means you can do everything with this technology on condition that implementation is carried out correctly but this is a general term and valid for all solutions on the market. IBM is offering with the Integration Bus a very robust and stable solution.

The solution itself is quite expensive for smaller companies because of a complex architecture setup if you just start. Easier and a more plug and playable solution which make an MVP easier in being able to show the value faster to the customer.

I've been using this solution for about 10 years in different projects and for different customers.

This is a very stable solution.

Scalability depends on the money that you have in your pockets. Technologically speaking, it's a scalable solution. 

I get good support from the IBM technical people. It also depends on your philosophy, how you implement this. I have a lot of very experienced people, but also a good relationship with the laboratories, which is also sometimes necessary when you're doing something new and a highly sophisticated implementation is required. You need to have a support team for the product development. 

The initial setup is straightforward, it's a simple solution. 

Evaluate and define a clear architecture, and set up a governance framework that includes a competence center that will take care of the usage, the licenses which will be needed, and do guarantee the reuse of interfaces and components.

I always suggest carrying out a proof of concept each time. People who are able to set this up and also monitor it, will discover how easy it is to customize and to integrate the architecture. The POC creates familiarity and also an understanding of the skill set required. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are trying to use IBM Integration Bus in our organization. We have multiple things to do. Like DataStage, we also have SAP BODS as another ETL. We are also using JAM Server and Java. 

Instead of separately writing the Java code and restful web service and then using the ETL and JAM Server to call on a file basis, I am thinking of using IBM Integration Bus. I have a message flow. Once I drop a file, IBM Integration Bus will pick up all the functions, do everything on the MQ Server, and finally fit it with the web service, which is also created in IBM Integration Bus. I would have the complete message flow in one architecture site. I can apply it by using ETL, Java, and the JAM Server. However, it is failing at the data mining stage itself. It could be because of my lack of knowledge of IBM Integration Bus.

I use the integration of Kafka and the message flow, which is really good. It is also good for moving any file from one location to another. 

Using IBM Integration Bus in the data stage is pretty simple. You can see the preview and other things.

The MQ server integrated with IBM Integration Bus is really great. I don't have to do a lot of configuration from that side. It is really good.

It needs improvement in terms of technical support as well as in terms of integration of data mining. I am not convinced about many things in this solution, such as the conversion of the DFDL or copybook file, which is the conversion from a text file to XML. It is very complex.

They should also provide more information about this solution in the IBM Knowledge Center. I can get a lot of information from the IBM Knowledge Center about DataStage, but I don't get that much information about IBM Integration Bus. There is hardly any information even on the internet and various channels such as YouTube. They can provide good step-by-step documentation based on a company's requirements. It would be really helpful.

My company is mainly looking for data mining and communicating with multiple servers. IBM Integration Bus is good for communicating with multiple servers, but it needs improvement for XML conversion and data mining. We have a lot of old systems that use XML.

I have been using IBM Integration Bus for two to four months.

I contacted technical support, but I wasn't able to get the correct answer. I feel I wasn't given a good response. I was communicating with a person from technical support, and he took two to three months to help me with the support. Finally, he delegated that ticket to some other person, and he resolved my issue in one week, but the solution was not convincing. 

I wanted to know how DataStage does one-to-many and many-to-one mapping because it was failing in IBM Integration Bus. I have a DFPL file, and I have an XML Schema. I want to map the added element from the DFPL file to the XML Schema. The technical support person was saying that you have to write the ESQL code for mapping, but I don't know how many elements are there. Suppose I have 100 elements for one area at present, but next time, I might have 90 elements. He was saying that you should know somehow where IBM Integration Bus is failing, but there was no way to find that out. The mapping for that element was not there in the dynamic run-time query.

The initial setup is complex. It is not user friendly. When you have a file in the MQ Server, it moves to the next directory, which is the output. It is very complex to call a web service. It should just give the setup of the endpoint and do some basic stuff so that it can be consumed by the web service. It might be complex because of my less experience in using IBM Integration Bus.

I would recommend this solution if you are not doing any XML conversion or data mining and just want to use a message flow, such as reading a file and transporting to another location and then calling some message and integrating it with an existing system such as Salesforce.

If you have a lot of integration, I would recommend hiring some experienced people for it. IBM Integration Bus is a very big product, and people don't know even 20% of this product. If people have good knowledge of it, they can really do a lot of stuff. Based on my understanding, its complexity is the reason why people don't have good expertise in this product. I am an experienced Java professional, but I am facing a lot of difficulties in understanding IBM Integration Bus.

I would rate IBM Integration Bus an eight out of ten. It needs improvement for data mining, DFDL, and schema converter. There should also be more documentation and information in the IBM Knowledge Center.

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.

We use the solution for supply chain management between ERP systems and warehouse management systems. We use it with multiple external partners.

The solution has improved our organization in the sense that it offers new graphical user interfaces and protocols. The fact that they have been made available has helped out business.

The solution has a variety of valuable features.

The ESB characteristics are great. The transformation, protocol bridging and routing are great.

The list of features on offer are both useful and actionable.

The cost is pretty cheap, compared to what else is available in the market.

The solution has been on the market for ten to 15 years, so it's had a lot of time to develop.

The monolithic architecture is an issue.  Due to the fact that it's a built on monolithic architecture, the solution is not very lightweight. It's not highly productive, so, in that sense, it's not so user friendly.

The solution needs to be a little bit more business-friendly in its API management capability.

The solution needs to improve its security and its proactive notification of security issues.

The expiry of the passwords, certificates, and things like that need to be powered by alerts so that it's more obvious that it's something we need to update (before everything actually expires).

I've been using the solution for ten or more years. It's been over a decade since I originally started using the product. I've been working at this particular company as an enterprise architect for the last three years.

The solution is very stable. It's reliable.

I don't recall experiencing any bugs or glitches recently. It doesn't crash.

The solution is scalable. When we need to expand the solution, we can do so easily.

We have about 5,000 integrations on the product. 

It is an integration platform, so everybody related to supply chain management uses it, and eCommerce as well.

We've dealth with technical support in the past and have been more than satisfied with their level of service. They are knowledgable. They respond quickly. I'd rate it nine out of ten overall.

Although we didn't use another solution per se, we do use MuleSoft. 

MuleSoft is more lightweight. It's not as monolithic. We use MuleSoft and another IBM solution. However, we've been using IBM Integration Bus for such a long time at this point. It's been ten to 15 years or so. We've only used MuleSoft for the last three years. It has high productivity and a good number of integrations and the API exchange capabilities.

We run the solutions in parallel.

MuleSoft is a pretty good solution, however, we've noticed that the pricing over the last few years has gone up and it's become quite costly.

The solution has been on the market for over a decade, so the initial setup is pretty straightforward. They've had time to perfect the process. There's also a lot of people who understand how to install it, as it's a mature product with lots of history. Many people have worked with it.

The pricing is pretty good. We've noticed that it's quite reasonable, whereas, for example, solutions like MuleSoft are rising. Salesforce recently acquired MuleSoft and has grown its market share, however, the pricing is turning people off. IBM is much more reasonable.

We're IBM customers. We don't have a business relationship with IBM.

The solution is deployed on an underlying platform in the traditional MQ.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. I'd rate it higher, however, it's not user friendly. That said, it works really well.

We are using Integration Bus for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) services. We are using it to connect APIs to servers, we are using it as an integration bus for hosting, and we are hosting our web services over it. I am using and testing this from the QA (Quality Assurance) perspective.  

The Integration Bus has provided us with a certain level of security. For instance, before we used this solution, we were directly connecting to databases through a DB link. We were able to stop that practice and make it more secure using Integration Bus. It has also provided us with the capability to reuse developed services. Services we developed can now be used with multiple systems and we are able to remove duplicate applications due to this advantage.  

Surely something that can be improved is session management. Sometimes sessions hang. Practically every day we hear about session congestion and this kind of thing. Troubleshooting the issue has become a long-standing problem. Where the true problem lies is a challenge for our support team.  

The session management issue may be a bigger problem for us because our support team is not so highly trained. Also, sometimes our developers are not able to dig down to locate the actual problem. To resolve the issue when it occurs, we have to at least restart the server. It is not really solving the problem, it just relieves the symptoms. These session management problems are the basic issues we are having, but otherwise, our services have become better after bringing in the Integration Bus.  

One thing I would like to have added to Integration Bus is a plugin — or some other software, — to enable testing the performance of our services from the application hosted on the IBM service. I think that the users of the system should be able to get something like that and somehow do performance testing on their own. Currently, I have used some studio or some plugin to find these results. Another option is using services that are available that I have also tried. If IBM could provide this same type of testing capability in its application, that that would be great. It would enable us to report to our business on the facts about how much we have improved from the earlier architecture.  

We have been using IBM Integration Bus for the last three years.  

It is a stable product especially with the release of version 10. We had problems with version 9. But now, version 10 was really a lot more stable and a lot of things have improved. We are much more satisfied with the product and stability of the performance. It is fairly rare that we are unable to troubleshoot something. But I think that most of the problems that we have, from my point of view, is because we are not better trained on the product as a whole. Maybe training could resolve some of our troubleshooting issues. Everything may not be the fault of the product.   

We had scaled up the product usage, so I know it is scalable. We were only using it with a few systems in the beginning and now we are using it with a whole bank of systems and all of the systems are integrated tools.  

The IBM partner that we are working with here is System Limited. IBM was not directly supporting us during the installation and if we have issues we work with the IBM partner.  

We did previously have another solution called BixTalk which we were using four to five years ago. One major problem with BizTalk was that we had very few people available who were actually trained on it. Secondly, there were some sever issues as well. We had a synchronization problem on top of that. Because it was so long ago I do not remember all the issues. Maybe we did have some other problems also. But we had a problem with the product support as well.  

From an installation point of view and just initially setting up this product, it required a lot of configuration. The configuration is the harder part of the installation. Otherwise, the installation was done in a few days by our team. I do not remember exactly whether we had any major problems in doing that, but it could be there were problems and I just did not hear about them.  

There were a lot of things to configure, but that was taken care of by a different department. Our operations department would be the group that handled this. So I do not have actual first-hand information because I did not participate in the process.  

It is a little hard to suggest a product for someone else without knowing anything about their situation. I would surely recommend it for companies that have lots of applications that they want to integrate. This is mostly what I would recommend it for. If you want a platform that seamlessly integrates your different applications, IBM Integration Bus for you.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate IBM Integration Bus as something like seven to eight. For the time being, I will give it a seven. I am pretty much satisfied with the product, but there are certainly ways I have mentioned in which it could improve.