IBM App Connect

We have hundreds of applications that need to exchange data with each other. It has to be safe (no message lost, no message duplicated) and secure. it has to be transactional. We need to be able to investigate later what was the initial message received, how was the mapping done, and what was the end message sent to the destination. We need also a robust error handling framework, capable of storing the error for long-term storage and retrieval and for immediate triggering of necessary alerts. We need also a robust routing capability so that a specific message received from one application could be easily routed to one or many other applications. We realize this via MQ PubSub and Publication node in AppConnect.

At my previous organization working for a web startup company, we had an application designed that consumed lots of web traffic and displayed extracted data in a meaningful manner. We decided to go with IBM App Connect to help aggregate data from our various apps into a single data store.

We use it to build the orchestrations in the App Connect studio to load the data, implement the logic and functions. It has many options to connect to different platforms compared to other tools. It's easy to set, user friendly and easy to understand as all the tabs and fields under them are descriptive and very detailed.

IBM App Connect is used for exposing business APIs to external consumers and other partner applications in a secure manner. It provides an integrated platform for running, creating and managing APIs. It is also integrated with IBM App Connect Professional (f.k.a IBM Cast Iron). The APIs developer in Cast Iron can be exposed securely through API connect.

It is being used to develop enterprise wide integrations. You can quickly develop integrations between systems that are done in other software would take much longer and difficult to achieve.

Cast Iron was one of many iPaaS solutions that we chose to evaluate to solve several integration problems we had across the business. This product was evaluated by myself and several of my colleagues but never brought into a production environment. The primary reason for us never bringing into production is the numerous issues we had just during the evaluation as well as the non-intuitive interfaces.

We are an IBM reseller and consulting partner. In my role leading our Salesforce practice, my main area of interaction with IBM is WebSphere Cast Iron as an integration middleware for integrations with Salesforce.