BW 5.x Developer Interested in BW 6.x's Capabilities

We primarily use BusinessWorks to integrate TIBCO Master Data Management with other systems using TIBCO Enterprise Message Service for messaging. This is used across two primary business units in North America, however this platform is intended to scale to be a global solution across the entire organization.TIBCO BusinessWorks provides web service endpoints that orchestrate data transformations for the mastering of customers across different systems used within each business unit.

It's about the same as other integration tools that we have used. As is with any other middleware tool, they all suffer from the experience of the individual using it to fully utilize its efficiency and effectiveness. There have been many shortcomings in our implementation due to varying levels of developer experience and understanding of requirements.

From a simplistic standpoint, you can very rapidly bring new features to market without an extensive amount of work, but it's largely dependent on the developer's proficiency with the tool.

I've previously worked with Informatica PowerCenter and Oracle Data Integrator and have found there to be pros and cons to each, including BusinessWorks. Overall, BusinessWorks is able to do some very advanced tasks in very elegant ways, but there can be shortcomings to the interface. I've found it to be very difficult to follow data through mapping objects within processes, something that other tools do much better.

I've only used BW 5.x for this and have found it to be fairly difficult. I've used other debuggers and found there to be much more detail about what is happening with data structures that I have not been able to figure out with TIBCO BusinessWorks. This is likely better in BW 6.x, but I do not know due to my lack of experience with it. I've also found it to require quite a bit of work to implement into CI for building and testing of BW 5 applications, though it appears BW 6 simplifies this greatly.