If the environment has many different protocols for data exchange between partners and most of the protocols follow some standards like EDI X12, TIBCO BusinessConnect should be a good tool to take care this business use case. If the environment has a few simple protocols for data exchange, e.g. SFTP, FTPS or emails, some lighter weight tools will be enough and TIBCO BusinessConnect may be an overkill tool.
webMethods Trading Networks is an excellent choice for a business-to-business (B2B) gateway platform, for sending and receiving messages to/from external trading partner organizations. It excels at making it easy to define new interfaces and provides robust mechanisms for ensuring successful message delivery and processing through automatic retries. We also use it successfully for all our application-to-application (A2A) integration, which many would believe is beyond the scope of what webMethods Trading Network is good for; however, we have made it work and it has been very successful in our organization. I would not recommend using webMethods Trading Network for integration that requires low-latency or high-bandwidth data transfers. It is much better suited to shipping reasonable sized XML or JSON or flat file messages (less than 100 mb) around in situations that do not need sub-second latency. If you have low-latency or high-bandwidth needs, you should use a product more focussed on eventing, such as Kafka, for example.
When a new version is released, its better to test it thoroughly before letting customers apply the release in their real time environment. There were missing functionalities from the previous versions which were not identified ahead of time.
The main reason TIBCO BusinessConnect was selected is because of the overall solution it provides with the different TIBCO products. Since TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service are already in place and the canonical model is already built and integrated into the Information Bus, TIBCO BusinessConnect is the best tool to work with them.
