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.

It is a bundled product stack for A2A and B2B usage. It is one of the best products which I have used during my integration career.

It has all the features required to integrate and manage file transfers, Partner Management, logging mechanisms, adapters for mainframes, SAP, and many others.

Need to see more API portal features like monetizing APIs and private cloud readiness.

I have been using this product stack for several years now.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues on-premises, but I have yet to check with the virtualization concepts and cloud scalability coming up.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We did not try another solution previously.

The setup was well-documented.

We implemented with an internal team and we had vendor support.

It is worth the cost.

We checked with TIBCO for EAI and the MQ series for messaging.

It is a good product stack.

Ease of implementation and flexibility to hold the business logic are the most valuable features.

We have used webMethods because of its ubiquitous nature to talk to various technology platforms. Also, the solution had a finite life, webMethods provided a quick integration solution since it is relatively easier to implement, and also, it can hold the business logic in itself.

The client was planning to go in for a separate data exchange platform/Business Information Warehouse as a large-scale global project slated to be alive after five years.

It helped to improve the efficacy of production planning to the market demands and it has improved the quality due to faster information on quality issues.

Mostly, an improvement is needed in the product's documentation.

The documentation deficiencies were in the following areas; since it has been a while, I could recall the top instances where the escalation reached to my level.

wM SAP Adapter User Guide - Example, like Message Broker setup was unclear, leading to issues during Testing and we had refer the internet forums to understand that there is a Message Broker Cleanup utility and that needs to be setup as well.

Release Notes: Used to cover only the latest update for the SAP changes. What has been done to the older version (SAP R/3 4.6, etc.) were not mentioned.

I have used this solution for nearly a year.

In 2008, the technical support's response time was much longer than expected.

There was an implementation issue, i.e., some of the preconditions were not clearly mentioned, so we had to dig through multiple options to troubleshoot and find the right steps.

It was an Enterprise license and I am not sure of the current status.

We evaluated TIBCO.

Put the business first, consider the business architecture and requirements before deciding to go with webMethods. Today, there are multiple open-source, cheaper solutions like Talend available and we can consider those as well.

• Capability to handle almost all e-business standards: RosettaNet, EDI, ebXML Messaging Service, SWIFT, FIX, and CIDX
• Web-based user interface: Makes administration and monitoring much easier
• Segregation of user tasks: Controlled user permissions and gives better control over the TN environment
• Clear view of transactions: Makes analysis and monitoring easier
• Capability to set up Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs): Makes business secure and more efficient

• We could set up all trading partners in one place with different data transfer protocols
• Makes the middleware environment more efficient
• Helps the admin team: Has a clear view on transactions and their processing status without digging into actual implementations

Configuration and interaction of trading partners in the TN with an ActiveTransfer product.

I have been using this solution for nine years.

New deployer could handle almost all deployment related task for TN components.

We had some minor issues with the EDIINT module which were resolved in the newer version.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate the technical support at quite a high level.

We did not use any other solution previously.

The setup was straightforward.

It is an add-on product to the webMethods product suite. The capability it offers is at a very good price.

We did not evaluate any other options as we already had the webMethods product suite. It was more logical to go for the SAG product.

It gives value for your money. It is easy to implement and maintain.

webMethods provides the ESB backbone for us since more than 8 years without any hick ups

High throughput and excellent scalability.

Programming model with flow is hopelessly outdated. Forced migration from MessageBroker to Universal Messaging requires large scale reimplementation for JMS

ESB is rock solid. Products on top of Integration Server have much less stability.

No. Absolute top.

Webmethods ESB works, but support is layered an requires escalation every so often

We used IBM MQ Series and migrated due to licensing issues.

Significant topics with bespoke programming model (FLOW language), difficult to find experts and if, they are expensive. Wouldn't do it again.

Mixed team with vendor.

N/A

Initialy good pricing and good, if it comes to Enterprise license agreements.

It's a rather mature solution with lot's of design choices we would not accept in 2017. We are in fact considering to leave to other products.

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.

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.