IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition vs. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

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

As I mentioned earlier SQL Server Integration Services is suitable if you want to manage data from different applications. It really helps in fetching the data and generating reports. Its automation make it very easy and time efficient. It works well with large database as well. But it doesn't work well with real time data, it will take some time to gather the real time data. I would not recommend using it in a real time/fast-paced environment.

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

• Standard ETL use cases for daily loads
• Loading incoming data from Vendors which is placed on FTP and adding them to the SQL Warehouse
• Creating outgoing data files and writing them to Vendor FTPs
• Easy Active Directory integration for seamless connections to SQL Server
• CI/CD by hosting the code on visualstudio.com

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

• Connection managers for online data sources can be tricky to configure.
• Performance tuning is an art form and trialing different data flow task options can be cumbersome. SSIS can do a better job of providing performance data including historical for monitoring.
• Mapping destination using OLE DB command is difficult as destination columns are unnamed.
• Excel or flat file connections are limited by version and type.

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

Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure

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

SSIS is a great tool for most ETL needs. It has the 90% (or more) use cases covered and even in many of the use cases where it is not ideal SSIS can be extended via a .NET language to do the job well in a supportable way for almost any performance workload.

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

SQL Server Integration Services performance is dependent directly upon the resources provided to the system. In our environment, we allocated 6 nodes of 4 CPUs, 64GB each, running in parallel. Unfortunately, we had to ramp-up to such a robust environment to get the performance to where we needed it. Most of the reports are completed in a reasonable timeframe. However, in the case of slow running reports, it is often difficult if not impossible to cancel the report without killing the report instance or stopping the service.

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

The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools

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

I think SQL Server Integration Services is better suited for on-premises data movement and ADF is more suited for the cloud. Though ADF has more connectors, SQL Server Integration Services is more robust and has better functionality just because it has been around much longer

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

• Without this, we would have to manually update a spreadsheet of our SQL Server inventory
• We would also have poor alerting; if an instance was down we wouldn't know until it was reported by a user
• We only have one other person who uses SQL Server Integration Services , he's the expert. It would fall to me without him and I would not enjoy being responsible for it.

Incentivized