IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network allows users to view all relevant transactions from a single dashboard to quickly pinpoint and assess issues allowing resolution in minutes not hours.
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Mule ESB
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Mule ESB, from Mulesoft, is an open source middleware solution.
IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business is very well suited for medium to large businesses that have a large commercial / B2B customer set, limited technical resources, and very simple standardized integrations with their B2B customers. It might be less appropriate or a fit for brands that have a much more complex tech stack, smaller commercial customer base, and more complete sales/products or options for their clients.
If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.)
Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.)
Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.)
Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats.
The UI / UX is pretty straightforward. It does take some time to configure fully (everything is customized mapping tailored to your business's needs), but once everything is set up, their solution is incredibly reliable. Once it's fully onboarded, it's a very scalable solution for adding more clients and integrations to your business. Technical support could be better.
IBM Sterling Supply Chain can be more expensive and complex, and has lower customer and technical service support than some of the other players. Onboarding might be a bit faster with different providers. Other providers might be better for businesses that are still in the earlier stages of their maturity, with regular growth or regular changing business and processes that are not fully established, might find IBM Sterling less of a fit for their operations and integrations.
