IBM DataPower Gateway vs. webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS)

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

Where webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) is well suited is for any use case where there is a business process that can executed over a long period of time (days rather than seconds) and that traverses multiple business applications and/or multiple lines of business and requires manual input from end users to approve or action specific steps. It is not well-suited for any business processes that can be distilled into a traditional integration solution between business applications that does not involve manual end user input, these types of uses cases will execute more efficiently on a traditional integration broker or enterprise service bus style solution.

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

• Great process design user interface and usability
• Excellent tools for monitoring processes at runtime
• Business rules can be managed and updated by non-technical resources

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Pricing is opaque and higher than we'd like
• Some of the user interfaces are outdated and looking their age
• Require buy in from business to achieve return on investment

Incentivized

Cost of the appliance

Incentivized

We found webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) to be the most feature complete product in the BPM market when we evaluated it against other products available in the market. It provides the most features, the easiest to use process design and simulation tools, and the most efficient runtime process and rules engine. Just be aware that its pricing reflects this position in the market, but you get what you pay for.

Incentivized

• 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

• Initial adoption of BPMS was slow and required buy in from the business, which was only achieved through upper management buy in applying KPIs down the line
• Once a critical mass of business processes being automated with BPMS is reached, any processes that remain manual will stand out like a sore thumb and the business will be invested to automate those remaining processes too, so adoption of BPMS is like a slow snowball effect
• Not requiring technical resources such as developer to design and build out processes is a pipe dream and impossible to realise. You will always need experts in the automation tools you apply in your organisation, and webMethods BPMS is no exception

Incentivized