The tool has potential. Its capabilities and visual aspects could be considered rather basic but this might improve, particularly if the business intelligence/analytics aspect is leveraged. Once running well, it could allow (perhaps smaller) companies to successfully improve their customers' experiences through digitalizing customer journey - and we all know that customer loyalty goes a long way. However, whether or not the tool is comprehensive enough to deliver this for larger companies with more complex, multi- and omni-channel interactions is yet to be seen...
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
In terms of usability, it has many advantages over other competitors in terms of integration, as it allows for the optimized creation of integration flows in a very quick and intuitive way from browsers, allowing for granular export and import of work, guaranteeing compatibility between different versions of the product.
As our customers vary in size and maturity, the ROI ranges accordingly.
For younger, smaller businesses this is a useful tool. Digitalization of he customer journey has certainly helped save time and efforts in many cases.
For more mature market players the tool is not always comprehensive enough. Dashboard and report personalization take time and efforts, and sometimes it feels that a dedicated BI tool would be a more suitable solution.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
