HCL DataConnect vs. webMethods Trading Network

The choice to use Actian DataConnect really comes down to pricing and the type of integration project you are performing, specifically with the requirements, whether you want the integration to be on-premise or in the cloud, can you install agents on your servers etc. For integration tools it runs head to head with its competitors.

Incentivized

webMethods Trading Networks is an excellent choice for a business-to-business (B2B) gateway platform, for sending and receiving messages to/from external trading partner organizations. It excels at making it easy to define new interfaces and provides robust mechanisms for ensuring successful message delivery and processing through automatic retries. We also use it successfully for all our application-to-application (A2A) integration, which many would believe is beyond the scope of what webMethods Trading Network is good for; however, we have made it work and it has been very successful in our organization. I would not recommend using webMethods Trading Network for integration that requires low-latency or high-bandwidth data transfers. It is much better suited to shipping reasonable sized XML or JSON or flat file messages (less than 100 mb) around in situations that do not need sub-second latency. If you have low-latency or high-bandwidth needs, you should use a product more focussed on eventing, such as Kafka, for example.

Incentivized

• Map multiple source and destination tables - what would be done in many steps in SSIS can be done in one or two "maps" in Data Integrator.
• Platform independent, cloud based, no client software.
• Conversion of data types, write flat files - this helps us with integrating systems.
• Fairly straightforward to use if the user has ETL experience.

Incentivized

• Document tracking
• Efficient partner management
• Set up trading partners with connectivity information

Incentivized

• Integration Manager needs better scheduling improvements. Like dependencies, and not running a process again if the prior run is still running.
• New connector development does not seem a priority.

Incentivized

• Vendor is slow to add new features
• Performance scales with underlying database performance
• Use of My webMethods to administrate trading networks is clunky and slow

Incentivized

Data Integrator was initially a part of a package deal for us with our new Student Information System. It was chosen prior to my arrival at the institution. Since I discovered we have SQL Server licenses, we have decided to use SSIS instead since I have a background in the MSBI stack and SSIS appears to be more straightforward (process flow philosophy vs "map" philosophy.)

Incentivized

Ease of use and robustness of the product.

Incentivized

• Our customer likes the consistent reliable integrations we have built so we [got] a definite return on investment.
• Problems are fairly easy to handle and rework.

Incentivized

• Improved time to market for new A2A and B2B interfaces
• Ability to support modern standards with B2B partners
• Improved supportability and robustness when compared to the previous bespoke custom solution it replaced

Incentivized