Likelihood to Recommend 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 BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
Read full review Pros 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 It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow. Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors. If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites. Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day. Helps in load balancing. Read full review Cons 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 Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations 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 BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
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 I gave a 7 because this product BizTalk does need time and training to get familiar with the usability and features, it is not that easy to use.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
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 BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are
Microsoft SQL Server . Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware. A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business. A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts. Read full review ScreenShots