The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
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Oracle Integration (OIC)
Score 5.1 out of 10
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The Oracle Integration Cloud Service is an iPaaS providing prebuilt integration flows between applications, including other Oracle products. The Integration Cloud Service is scaled for enterprises, with prebuilt codeless adapters for on-premises and SaaS systems and low-code automation capabilities.
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.
For all type of integration except those with a huge volume. It can deal with 20MB of transactions and processing of 1GB file when a file is being read using file or FTP adapters. It cannot be used for EDI as this support is not there. OICS is a perfect fit for other integration and is best when a customer has Oracle applications in the landscape. It is even greater if you have a requirement to create a custom form and make use of Process Cloud. All of these work very well together seamlessly. API needs can be handled by APIary.
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.
Auto-association of Oracle applications prepopulates the application connector select box and preconfigures Oracle Integration (OIC) using secure credential access for faster integration.
Various other system connectors are available to use readily.
User-intuitive experience--Connectors, integrators, and dashboard can be seen on one page.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
Currently, it is not retaining the logs for more than 3 days, which it needs to address.
We also need some functionality inside the interface to re-push the same transaction again so that it will be helpful while testing and fixing the issue.
Also, some log errors are not giving the correct details. Oracle needs to rectify those.
The nearest thing I have used to OIC is UiPath, as it is often used as a tool to integrate software together. However, it is much more suited to legacy software which have little to no API endpoints. If the infrastructure already exists I understand why people use RPA for integration, however for when API's are easily accessible and you're using Oracle tools, OIC is better.
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.
Created a solution for unique business integration with minimal processing times
Saves my team about 7 hours per week because of how it communicates with all the information. Because it communicates faster, and because there's a lot of information to communicate with, another solution might not work.
