IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition vs. Microsoft Application Server (deprecated) vs. SAP Business Technology Platform

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

Microsoft Application Server has been incredible this past year during COVID. Previously I would have said that we could go without it, but after this past season, I’m glad we have utilized it. Without having this software set up prior to COVID, we would have been in a tough situation. I mention COVID a lot because we were able to continue our work almost seamlessly this entire year.

If you want to use a well-designed SAP technology to shift into the cloud, you will be more than satisfied with the BTP services overall. There are some improvements for beginners to help them get a better overview of what to do and how to start with their account. My recommendation is to take a foundation training course from the SAP learning hub to prepare for the first steps.

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

• Microsoft Application Server has proven to be highly reliable and effective at deploying to all of its clients.
• Application performance is surprisingly good and responsive even in bandwidth-constrained environments and generally very reliable.
• All software programs are manageable from a single location, even when bandwidth is limited.

• It is very easy to use.
• All the documentation around it is geared towards the enterprise use case, unlike some other hyperscalers' platforms.
• The SAP Business Technology Platform is very good because it's got the SAP customer and their business processes in mind. Probably my favorite thing about it is how easy it is to get up and running with a new use case and how well it natively connects to an SAP solution.

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

• Some security hotfixes and general release updates require restarts.
• We wish it supported more applications out of the box.
• Thin client support would be great for MS Application Server.

Incentivized

• The Automation Integration service has some outdated workflows
• New services should be available as entitlements as soon as they are released for a particular region without having to buy them from SAP for zero dollars
• Any subaccount should be able to change the IAS tenant. Currently, if you set it up for a particular IAS, you cannot change to another tenant and are required to recreate the services in a new subaccount.

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

Seamless integration with external system and dashboard to monitor the data flow and analysis are very essential for the business. The way the product is designed and modelled lead to minimum business disruptions. Adopting to the new and modern technology was easy. Keeping the central system as clean and adopting project bases development are advantages.

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

I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.

Okay, so the content that we have built on the platform is limited to specific testing on the iFlows within integration suite. The visualization layer is nice to use and helps with the design elements, however with developers that are more used to markup languages, it doesn't have the same CLI type feel when you want it. Perhaps the majority of users are that deep, but other platforms have a better CLI type developer experience.

Incentivized

Services are generally available

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

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

Stability is one of the first things we consider when evaluating software. MS Application Server has been rock solid and has reduced the time that our IT staff dedicates to maintaining our legacy applications.

Incentivized

The biggest problem we ran into was communication between SAP Business Technology Platform and onsite resources. Unfortunately our SAP Business Technology Platform and Cloud systems are under different customer numbers. I constantly had to open tickets under each customer number because I was unsure of where the issue lied. And having to create a dummy ticket for our ECC systems to open the ECC connections for another ticket under the Cloud customer is a pain.

Incentivized

Training material in Developers Community or from Learning hub are really good... also most of the time we route through Discovery center... so materials provided by SAP is really good.

Incentivized

Having a full cloud native environment for devlopment of microservices and digitals solutions while having standardized access to our core data on SAP via cloud connector is one of the main benefits of using BTP over others hypervisors. BTP is the standard hyperscaler as soon as something relies on data from SAP systems in our company now

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

It has a similar feature to what Microsoft Application Server has but at a greater cost and also having to deal with another vendor when we could use a full Microsoft Stack for better training and support.

Incentivized

SAP Concur allows our staff to book, reimburse and remain spend audit compliant. Our Concur system takes feed from Workday and interacts with Credit card vendor. It also makes posting to Accounting and does clearing. SAP Business Technology Platform helped in establishing connection with all these different tools in real time. It helps in getting paid to the card service provider through our Bank through interface, which is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Incentivized

It's scalable

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

• Our ROI has been great since it has enabled our IT staff to have a central location to perform application updates which enables us to save time and money.
• Deployment is very easy since the internal applications that required constant updating are now updated in one central location.
• It's a lot easier to be within compliance protocols requirements.

Incentivized

• Infusing Generative AI capabilities easily into our solutions with existing talent with minimal learning curve, has been very impactful. We have been able resolve several challenges for our clients with AI capabilities, that we could not, previously.
• Integration Suite is quite extensive in capabilities for bringing together the IT landscape into a single ecosystem.

Incentivized