IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition vs. Microsoft IIS

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.

Incentivized

Publishing applications or websites is easy with Microsoft IIS. You don't need external software or complicated tutorials involving command lines and editing configuration files. On other hand, sometimes the troubleshooter needs a high knowledge of Windows Server, Registry, and tools to debug the application. If you need to host non-Microsoft technology as PHP pages or have a low budget, I recommend IIS equivalent software as Apache.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
• IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
• IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Angular/node apps don't run on IIS, or at least we never figured out how. Rather we ended up using nginx.
• There are still occasional memory leaks - check your recycle settings!
• If you have very heavy usage for web APIs, IIS requires regular restarts for reasons unknown.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

As I've mentioned earlier, Microsoft IIS is very simple and easy to use. The user interface is a little bit overloaded with a huge number of different options, but once you have a little clue of what you are doing and what you need - no issues at all.

Incentivized

ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.

Incentivized

Deploys fairly quick enough and like the roll-out update feature decreasing the downtime and also plays well with other integration tools as well.

Incentivized

In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Apache is java. Java is unnecessary complex. No developer wants to invest in learning all the hundreds of text based configuration files to get something done. Also, apache gives you the most evil and un-usable user interface possible. [Microsoft] IIS makes [life] after development easy, which is already complex enough to be bothered by something as mundane as exposing your work over the internet.

Incentivized

Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Allowing us to internally host our monitoring websites allows quick access to data that can be quite hidden, saving developer time.
• It was inexpensive compared to more bulky solutions saving upfront cost.
• It’s easy to install and enable allowing more developer savings.

Incentivized