IBM DataPower Gateway vs. SPS Commerce

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.

Incentivized

When you find yourself growing and finding success faster than you can keep up with, SPS Commerce will save your life and your reputation. The services they offer are easy to understand, they are available with suggestions and ideas for better ways, personalization is available to best suit your needs or the needs of your customers so that you can really shine and relieve the worries that come with growing pains. SPS also helps to keep information accurate with less human touching to cause errors.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We can easily create and send order confirmations.
• We respond to the corresponding receiving departments with timely and accurate ASN's.
• Once the order has shipped, customer service utilizes the invoicing function.

Incentivized

• API security
• WAF improvements
• Security improvements
• REST support
• Kafka support and event streaming

• We have quite a few people here who use this portal, and we have it set up to receive an email when an order is available to print. As of now, you can only add a few recipients to receive those emails; it limits you.
• Invoicing is challenging at times as you have to remember to go in and invoice. If you forgot, it is hard to find the order to invoice, as it seems to disappear.
• We still haven't figured out how to have some of the invoicing features auto-populate, so there isn't so much to fill out. I wish some of those features were easier to use, or find if you have them.

Incentivized

Cost of the appliance

Incentivized

If I can drop it, I will this year. We gave it a decent try for over 4 years and it has gotten worse with each added connection.

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.

Phone support is generally very good and you can get a person on the phone within a few minutes. Their emailed customer support however is very poor and often goes several days or longer before receiving a response, if ever at all

Incentivized

In his brand DataPower has not competitors, in security, transform and data validations DataPower is better than other products.

In my opinion, SPS Commerce is the bottom out of all three provided here. I think, essentially, if you are looking to be hands off and only oboard on setup and don't plan on growing your business and want to not understand anything about EDI and how it affects your company, SPS Commerce is a fine choice. Just if you want to do anything beyond that, I believe you are going to have the worst time.

• 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.

Incentivized

• I enrolled in a product I ended up not using because the vendor that required it ended our working relationship and SPS refused to offer a refund. After I canceled it, they continued to charge our account for three more months of service.
• The interface is simple and easy to understand and use, so it saved time when preparing shipments.

Incentivized