1. Home
  2. Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Software
  3. TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo) Reviews
  4. User Review of TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo)
The case for BusinessWorks
October 26, 2017

The case for BusinessWorks

Elrick du Toit | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO BusinessWorks

Mainly used in the MES department for system integration. Limited use on business system level as yet, with the exception of some business systems being integrated with SAP.

Mainly used for process orchestration during integration. It allows us to use a standardized platform for building, deploying and monitoring our integration solutions.

  • Platform independence, although we are using just MS Windows
  • Powerful, with a great set of components (activities) available, yet also being able to customize and extend according to our needs
  • Runs quite stable within deployment
  • Deployed process can become quite resource intensive, with each deployment running within its own JVM
  • Licensing cost is quite high
  • The version we are using does not yet support newer technologies like REST and JSON natively
  • It might not provide the fastest platform to roll out solutions. It takes some time learning and getting used to it.
  • Standardizing our integration with SAP makes maintenance much easier
  • Quite a stable platform that mostly do not require much effort once deployed

BW provides a good development environment (although you have to pay quite a significant fee for it - other that most vendors) that allows for visual creation of flows. You can get by without any programming, but knowledge of XML and related technologies like XPath and XQuery is required.

Depending on the pattern and development and deployment methodologies you follow, the creation of a new flow can be either quick or slow. Once you know the tools, you can create flows quite easily and quickly.

We have not had a lot of previous integration tools to compare it with. From my experience the BW mappings are quite easy and powerful. The visual development environment allows you to simply drag and drop between source and destination. More complex mappings require a bit more insight, experience and effort. The ability to map complex, iterative data structures is a benefit and we use it extensively with integration to SAP.

From a deployment perspective we have however found the BW's way of handling data mapping and passing data between processes does require significant system resources.

The development environment includes a testing tool which is quite easy to use. There is no compiling needed as seen from some other vendors. The tester is quite powerful and allows you to test selected processes. It give you debugging options like breakpoints and stepping through the process. At each point in the process you can inspect the data entering and leaving each activity.

Each product has its unique characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. BW is not necessarily better than everything else. There are places where it shines, places where it competes well, and places where it loses out to other products.

In our case, BW was not selected to after competing against other products. In fact we still have other products running on site performing similar functions.

BW was selected to be our standard way forward due to its capability, extendibility with adapters, relative ease of use, support offering and cost.

We find it is well suited for integration solutions using messaging with XML as protocol.

A possible issue could that it may be used for solutions where BW is not really needed and its power does not come through. We have seen it being used as a tool for moving files around, which it can do but is a waste of the tool's power. It is too expensive to use for such trivial actions.