Market leader in API Management
July 02, 2019

Market leader in API Management

Rahul Malik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM API Connect

IBM API Connect provides a unified platform to house all of our company's APIs. The beauty of this tool is that we are able to access and manage all our APIs from a single place and not have to install additional softwares like API Manager or Apigee etc. We are to make full use of this product to expose our older services as well in addition to the new ones being developed through API and having IBM WebSphere DataPower to serve as the Gateway which is already an established market leader in terms of security, speed and handling massive volumes without breaking a sweat. The wizard to create new API is very simple and straightforward. Once that is done, we can publish the new API created to all the concerned parties. Its integration with the cloud is seamless and very beneficial if you know how to leverage is properly.
  • The best part is that it is a one-stop solution for hosting all the APIs and keep on increasing as the new ones are added. It has been the leader in our Digital transformation and the features of security, interoperability and accommodating all types of clients based on various technologies has been the greatest asset for us.
  • The creation of new API is fairly simple and doesn't require much [of a] learning curve. Once you have created the new API, you can publish it as well to the specific audience and they can try to interact with that API with the required security parameters to get to the actual service back-end.
  • The installation is quite straightforward and the product is ready to go. The deployment of the artefacts from environment to the other or code promotion is relatively simple as compared to other older products.
  • The Gateway used here is IBM Datapower which is one of the most secure, reliable, highly available, fast and can integrate with almost any front-end or back-end.
  • The first thing challenge we faced with the product was that if you deploying it to a third party cloud, that was very challenging and we need IBM team help at every step of the way and as well all know IBM support doesn't come cheap. A reason for that is that there isn't enough documentation done on the subject from IBM side.
  • The upgrade process is not that seamless and involves a lot of hassles.
  • You really need to have our requirements sorted out clearly because it is not very easy to customize the UI according to your needs, So you need to involve IBM from the start and give them clear requirements and then work with them to achieve it.
  • IBM API Connect has been very beneficial for our business because it has increased the productivity and collaboration to a great extent. All the team members are aware of the method they need to follow to develop new API and check internally if there is already an API existing to replicate that functionality. So, reusability has increased significantly after this and saved us a lot of effort and time.
  • The work of the IT Security has lessened because now we don't need to submit IP white-listing requests to them of each new API being developed. If that client is allowed to hit 1 service, he is allowed to hit other services as well as long as he has the proper SSL certs and auth tokens or any other method of authentication used in the service.
  • The code promotion and deployment of artefacts has been really smooth and without issues. So, that is a big plus if you consider production deployment going swiftly and hassle-free.
The power of IBM APIC is much more in contrast to Apigee or any other product of the same domain because it is having DataPower as the backbone which allows for easy integrating with almost any platform, providing the highest level of security, handling millions of transactions at wire speed and also capable of transforming the message content as and when required. Secondly, it acts as a unified portal for all the services and we can manage all the API's from a single place and make changes. We can look for any services here, it acts as a repository for all the organization services and we can assign specific audience to specific services.
IBM API Connect is a perfect fit if you want to digitize and expose all your new plus old legacy services in a unified manner through the API mechanism. If your company has many different applications of different nature and working, then it works like a charm because you can separate them based on the URI which you assign to them. Another great advantage is of the Datapower gateway because you can integrate that with all most any system seamlessly and that too with the highest security protocol and volume without any issues. Another advantage is the whitelisting of the IPs which you need to do only once and after that, you can call many services from the same front-end or back-end because the IP remains the same, only the URI part varies. It is not particularly useful in a situation where you only have a handful of services and you only make changes in those and not developing new services or adding new clients.

IBM API Connect Feature Ratings

API access control
9
Rate limits and usage policies
8
API usage data
9
API user onboarding
8
API versioning
8
Usage billing and payments
8
API monitoring and logging
9