Likelihood to Recommend As an open source rule engine and product suite, Drools is well suited for the small and middle scale business to manage and integrate the rules to build the rule-driven system which can process the business-critical data and events to produce the automated decision. It is better to use Drools in the well-secured environment (back-end behind the DMZ), not putting it on the customer-facing front or exposing it directly the to public where may bring direct security risk in the enterprise environment. Drools still needs a lot hardening on the security side.
Read full review IBM WebSphere Hybrid edition is well-suited for the development and deployment of large enterprise-level applications such as Electronic Health Records that are used in our organization. IBM WebSphere is appropriate for organizations that require strong security and compliance as it provides a high level of security and compliance features. This works well with organizations that are subject to strict regulatory requirements, such as hospitals.
Read full review Pros Writing rules with business focus Rules evolution and maintenance separate business logic from program code Read full review IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition has done marvelous in building and deploying Java Enterprise applications. It also does well in automating deployment and scaling. This has made it easier for our organization to deploy updates to our applications. IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition does well in security by providing features that protect enterprise applications. Read full review Cons Fusion doesn't support persistence of working memory, which brings some extra high availability risk to our business. Guvnor still has a lot room to be implemented, it is not so user-friendly for non-technical people, so a lot of business users complain it is hard to master. Rule execution server doesn't even have JMX implemented, hard to be monitored. Drools is still lacking support for key Web services standards. Read full review Ease of use in terms of deployment, give simple interface to do simple stuff like Tomcat, JBoss or GlassFish. Takes long time to start the server. The Liferay wars need to be decorated and then deployed. Perhaps we could simplify that. Some of the concepts are good for complexity that WAS can handle but could be simplified and better documented, like concepts of well and profile, context, etc. A Liferay war file created using Liferay Developer studio runs fine in Tomcat, however that may not run in WAS 7.x because it needs to be decorated. I had one war for a Liferay portlet with a simple cron job, and had hard time running to WAS server. It was running on the latest free download done on my friends m/c. Other times I have seen that there are issues running a war file that runs on Tomcat but runs on WAS after lot of customization for WAS. The corporations like this however, the product may need better vibrant community of users where issues can be discussed. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Mostly we will be renewing unless the strategic direction changes drastically or there are other complelling external circumstances. We've been on a multi year project to modernize our legacy applications and that effort will continue for the foreseeable future.
Read full review Usability WebSphere Application Server is used across our organization. Most projects use this for Java products and applications. Being robust and scalable makes it even more usable. We love using WebSphere Application Server due to its configuration management ability made simple and vast across all java related parameters. It is dependent on the features and upgrades and IBM releases some great upgrades to WebSphere Application Server.
Read full review Performance Deploys fairly quick enough and like the roll-out update feature decreasing the downtime and also plays well with other integration tools as well.
Read full review Support Rating IBM was quick to respond when we had an issue with our specific infrastructure. We raised a PMR, which they picked up quickly and updated us about every step of the way. We had an appropriate fix for quite a business critical issue within a fortnight, which was impressive!
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
Read full review Cleo Integration Clould has many bells and whistles; however, when we added more maps and trading partners, it really slowed down. We found that the Cleo support was very slow to respond and there was a language barrier. IBM Websphere had better customer support and its processing was much faster than
Cleo Integration Cloud Read full review Return on Investment The IT department quickly adopted Drools as it is a very good java-based rule engine, which saves a lot of time to meet the project timeline and balanced our business requirements. Recently we start considering the OpenRules, which may be more business user-friendly. Read full review Continuous uptime of the business applications we manage It's now much simpler for me to build and deploy cloud-native applications. Because it can offload for me management and maintenance of the application server to IBM I can focus on the development, deployment and testing of the applications which is more important Read full review ScreenShots