webMethods.io Reviews

The API Gateway is very good.

The Integration Server is very good.

Terracotta is very useful.

There are many components that I have used.

It's very flexible and a good platform to use.

There should be better logging, or a better dashboard, to allow you to see see the logs of the services. 

Also, storing the message bodies in the database and allow you to search them would be a nice feature to have.

These features should be enhanced to facilitate the work for the developer.

I have been working with webMethods Integration Server for four years.

webMethods Integration Server is a scalable product.

It is being used only by the developers, it's not for public users.

We have three developers in our organization who are using it.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, in another company, I worked with webMethods Broker.

The price is a little bit high, especially regarding their support.

The support fees are very high and we don't need such huge support.

I think anybody who is implementing this product should learn about the balancing and the API portal that is going to be used. You should have a good developer that is able to use the platform and understands most of the capabilities that it provides.

Overall, it's a really good product.

I would rate webMethods Integration Server a nine out of ten.

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 use this enterprise integration application to support web service portals, B2B processes. I'm a consultant and we are customers of webMethods.io.

The internal services that they provide make it easy to work with. It's easy to construct new interfaces like apps, client portals, and so on because they consume the portal services that we provide.

I think rules engine processes and BPM processes should be improved. I think they must accommodate the future of the communication between systems and that is related to web services and the like. 

I've been using this product for 20 years. 

The support is at a medium level of satisfaction. 

The initial implementation was straightforward but then there are multiple requests that follow and that may be more difficult. WebMethods is used to provide services to the portal. Users don't directly use our platform; they use the platform that uses our platform and in that sense we probably have about 1,000 users. We don't have plans to increase usage for now. 

My advice is to pay attention to the human resources because it's difficult to have senior consultants in all areas, it's rare. There aren't many good, experienced consultants in the market. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We have an open banking initiative in Indonesia. We are mandated by a regulator's bank in Indonesia to open up our services to other institutions, not only banks, but also financial technology (FinTech) companies and startups as well as eCommerce or other industries.
Thereby, they can consume banking services through an API, such as our funds transfers, mobile banking services, or a bill payment, like electricity, water bills, college, and so on, through an API to their applications. It is not obligatory that you need to download our mobile banking in order to do these transactions, but you can do the transaction using other applications, such as the FinTech or eCommerce application that the customer currently has. Those use cases, for the open banking readiness for Indonesia, utilize webMethods API Gateway and standardized services of API for fund transfer, debit credit transfer, bill payments, and opening up a savings account using online applications. Those are pretty much the use cases for webMethods API Gateway in order for us to connect it with FinTech startups, eCommerce, and other institutions who would like to consume banking transactions through Mandiri.

Since we are a very highly regulated industry, which is a bank in Indonesia, we are not allowed to host any financial transaction outside of the Indonesian region. So, the solution must be deployed on-premise inside of our data center.

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. (Read my webMethods Integration Server review here.) There is also webMethods API Gateway and Software AG Apama. 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.

Within the new version, webMethods API Gateway gives us an end-to-end lifecycle from the creation of the API up into the development, deployment, and promotion into production/live. The current end-to-end lifecycle of the API gives us enough authority and governance of the API. We know what are currently live services, what is in the testing stage of development, and what version that has been commissioned. So, the full life cycle itself gives us full authority and governance of the API.

You can carefully select what services can be consumed by the outside and what services can only be consumed internally. Also, you can see what the fallback scenario is, if some services are customized and what is the impact analysis, e.g., what is the impact to other services that depends on certain services that we are currently automizing. These are very critical capabilities for API implementation in any organization. You do need to have good API governance for it, not only tools, but also all the procedurals. You will need all the standard operating procedures for starting a development of API up to deployment into production.

webMethods API Gateway provides an engagement platform for managing hackathons. Our last hackathon was in 2019. We developed several services in the cloud using a sandbox environment, so it does not connect with our real life production environment. We created some accumulated transaction behavior, so hackathon developers could connect it with our box services within the sandbox environments. It does provide good freedom to host competition in an isolated environment.

At Mandiri, we divided webMethods API Gateway into two layers, the external API gateway and the internal API gateway. The external API gateway is for Mandiri channels and our core partner channel for feedback, eCommerce, and other institutions. With their channel, they like to connect and consume services. webMethods API Gateway gives you a sense of security and quite adequate minimum security to secure services, e.g., DDoS attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and queries for SQL injection. These are already built inside of webMethods API Gateway. 

It has a good role definition and scope for its services. Expected channels can only access what type of services, and we can define those as per our contract with prospective partners. So, it boils down to the architecture: How do you like to architect the integration and partnering with other institutions? It depends on that. However, the system itself gives you that flexibility.

webMethods API Gateway gives us a set of rules and good security for securing outside work to connect with our services. It has good minimum security measurements built-in. However, webMethods API Gateway itself has very minimum API governance. You need to have a central site in place to have full-fledged governance, which is one of their modules.

The solution provides a fully customizable portal that has built-in testing and collaboration capabilities. Because it is similar with other well-known products in the market, the process doesn't have specific requirements. We do have a good adoption rate. We only have two weeks of learning and customizing the behavior to developers. By the third week, every developer can actually develop by themselves.

Previously, we had some difficulties with end-to-end lifecycle management of APIs because the product was not yet mature enough. Two years ago, it was not yet mature in terms of the capabilities, which were still separated and not yet consolidated. There were several modules of webMethods API Gateway which needed to be consolidated into one webMethods API Gateway. Previously, they had two separate modules for API management as well as others. 

One of the improvements that need to be added into future releases is the ability to support other third-party monitoring tools. I know that they already support Jenkins, but in Mandiri. We use Bamboo for the deployment as well as part of Jenkins. We also install other monitoring tools, such as AppDynamics, for collecting information on performance and the problems of API Gateway hosting services. 

With performance, there is room for improvement in regards to if we would like to put another extra layer of security on it, such as SSL. This is affecting their performance quite significantly. They need to improve the process of managing the SSL and other things inside their solutions, so there will not be quite such a significant impact to the performance.

With their API-Portal, you need to have flexibility when changing the layout and teams, giving more flexibility to rearrange and do some type of UX/UI that fits into your organization. The API-Portal that comes from Software AG has some of those limitations, with only certain parts that can be fully customized.

We have used it for almost three years, since 2017.

How do you get money from selling or offering your financial services to the other partners or institutions? It comes down to monetization. How do you monitor usage of certain particular protection or usage of services? I do see a lack of capabilities inside of the monetization area for them. They have a cloud infrastructure that is pay per use type of a thing. If you already use 1,000 transactions per se, then you can be charged and billed. I see room for improvement there for their side on that particular capability of the monetization.

We have evaluated other solutions, such as Apigee and MuleSoft, back in 2016. but since we already have Enterprise Service Bus that is using the integration server, which is collecting and managing all the integration services inside, we wanted to see the end-to-end picture of the service itself. It was very logical that you need to have end-to-end monitoring and trend deployment from the service deployment, up into exposing the external world using webMethods API Gateway. We see those advantages from using webMethods compared with other solutions, such as Apigee or MuleSoft, because of the continuation of the architecture. We would also like to expand those into our separating stacks.

In every implementation of webMethods API Gateway, I strongly suggest that you need good API governance. webMethods has their API governance all built inside of your license. It is a continuation between the services using the webMethods Integration Server and webMethods API Gateway, exposing those services into the outside world. You need to have good governance for that.

I would rate this solution an eight (out of 10).

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. 

It interfaces between applications, as well as between the cloud and our existing on-prem applications.

We primarily utilize packaged applications; we don't really have a lot of custom applications. We do have a few custom interfaces, and some vendors may have created a custom interface on their own, but we present a standard integration, a standard enterprise service bus, to connect to.

We're able to secure our front-end website away from our back-end systems using Integration Server. It acts as a go-between. That way, whether we're requesting things from our website or our IBR or our IPT, we can have multiple interfaces. They're secured in their own ways, and they don't have direct access to our back-end databases.

We're a utility company and before we got this application we would actually send out people to the meters to read them. Sometimes they had handheld devices, but sometimes they had to walk up to the meters. When we switched to AMI meters, we leveraged the ability of the solution to talk to each of the meters on a daily basis, as well as to turn a meter on and off in real time.

Additionally, we use the same application to process payments. Before this solution, we primarily had walk-in centers and a lot of manual processes for receiving payments. Very few payments were done online or via eCheck. Now we can have a whole host of payment options, as well as enable different payment vendors to connect. It has automated a lot of our manual processes.

webMethods Integration Server provides a single hybrid integration platform for all our needs. It provides reusability. We don't have to worry about taking each and every point-to-point integration. Now we are hosting a true enterprise service bus, by having a set of APIs that can really be leveraged and reused by multiple vendors and multiple connectors.

Its adapters and connectors provide the fastest way for us to build an integration. We're able to turn things around pretty quickly. I'm sure there are other faster ways that other people have done, but this meets our needs. 

It's helped us to become more modern. It's allowed us to service our customers in the ways that they want. They can now use on-the-phone payments or website payments or whatever way they want to do it.

Internally, it provides a standard way for us to be able to interface with things. Now, we don't have to have unique ways to do so and much more code and numerous ideas on how to do things. We just end up having a standard.

It provides us with ease of modifying and redeploying integrations. We have been able to do that very successfully. It just makes it easier. We were able to put in an Agile framework, which means that as requirements come up and changes are made, we're able to schedule them on a regular basis. But we were doing that for the long-term before, as well.

Its support for the latest standards make it possible to plug in modern tooling. We've used that in several places, especially for IoT integrations. The result has been reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction.

The most valuable feature is its ability to quickly spin up connections between the real-time interfaces, as well as being able to regulate how much traffic moves back and forth between applications. This is important because one of the things that we utilize it for is payments from our customers. We can have multiple customers utilizing the same set of APIs and they can make real-time payments into our system, which is really useful. We don't have to worry about people making duplicate payments or providing incorrect information. And we get that information right away.

Also, the solution has a very comprehensive and versatile set of connectors. I've been able to utilize it for multiple, different mechanisms. We do a lot of SaaS and we do have IoT devices and the solution is comprehensive in those areas. There's a standard utility protocol for talking and several of the applications we have utilize that utility. It's a standard set of APIs, and Integration Server adapted to that right away. For our website we're utilizing standard Wisdom APIs and we were able to create that. The solution is very versatile with all its capabilities and is able to do what we need to do. We even use it for Salesforce.

It provides us application integration, data integration, business-to-business communications, and APIs. We haven't used it for microservices. That range of features is very important to us. It conducts our real-time payment applications, as well as our real-time integrations between our internal applications.

The logging capability has room for improvement. That way, we could keep a history of all the transactions. It would be helpful to be able to get to that without having to build a standalone solution to do so.

I have used webMethods Integration Server for about 12 years.

We haven't had any issues. Everything has been working. We like the new version, the new upgrades. It seems they keep improving upon things. We've put in high-availability and fault tolerant solutions so we have had zero downtime due to the system itself.

We haven't run into any limitations up until now. We utilize it for a lot of different things, but we haven't run into any speed issues or other problems.

We end up talking to our customers using the solution and we have over 250,000 customers. Our internal users don't really even notice it. They just see that everything is up and running and available in real time.

We haven't run into an issue requiring technical support from their side. It's usually something that we have to adapt to or modify. It's usually something internal.

We used eCheck. It was website-based for point to point integrations. We switched to Integration Server to improve speed to market and have a quicker way to turn things around. We also wanted to put in some newer interfaces that would talk to all of our customers.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We were able to quickly utilize some templates, things that they already had, to get it up to speed.

We took our time. We developed and deployed our first product in eight months. Then, over the course of time, we were able to add more and more until we had a robust solution.

Our implementation strategy was to look at business needs to prioritize things.

In terms of maintenance, it only requires oversight, nothing too obtrusive. We've got one integration engineer dedicated to all of our integrations and we haven't had any issues yet.

webMethods provided the name of a third-party and then we reached out to them and we got them onboard. The company's name was Kellton Tech and they did a very good job. They're still with us.

We were able to realize ROI fairly quickly because we were able to reduce a lot of the manual work and point-to-point integrations. If you think of truck costs and the amount of gas expense, we don't have to worry about those on a daily basis anymore. Those alone would justify it.

It's a good deal for the money that we pay.

We went through evaluation criteria with three or four vendors and we found this one to be the best. The primary advantages of this solution were the supportability and ease of use. Also, the deployment time was reduced and development was more Java-based.

Start with proofs of concept. Create a few good proofs of concept and get it up and running and you'll be able to escalate things. Make them achievable.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the solution is that I should have envisioned it a little bit bigger. We had a lot of point-to-point solutions that we could have considered and I think we still have a lot more to go. Also, if the back-end is not available, we should build in some logic that says, "Okay, now that I'm not getting a valid response or any response, I should be able to quickly use a default or turn off some features." We're trying to redesign and re-engineer it for that to happen.

As an overall product and solution, it has met our needs.

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. 

Customers use it for B2B integration, such as exchanging EPI or EDR documents, as well as settlement documents.

With webMethods, the creation of servers and the utilization of Trading Networks facilitate B2B integration. It resolves any related issues effectively.

Perhaps in the area of Microservices, where I think Trading Networks could benefit from some improvements.

We have experience in webMethods for 20 years. We have a lot of experience using Trading Networks for B2B integration. Our customers also use Trading Networks for B2B integration.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The customer service and support team has been good.

Neutral

The setup is easy. Moreover, it is easy to maintain.

The feedback we receive indicates that the value they derive from webMethods surpasses the cost.

Trading Networks is high priced and quite expensive.

Our customers use this solution because it is well-known to them, so they choose Trading Networks when they require B2B integration.

I would definitely recommend using this solution. Overall, I would give this solution an eight out of ten.