I haven't evaluated other options, but I've heard about Apigee and that it's a good solution. I've heard that Apigee is technically better than IBM API Connect, but I don't have the facts on why it's better. What I heard from the customer is that Apigee is more costly than IBM, and that customer paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in Jordan. The customer contacted my company for a POC for IBM API Connect, so it seems that the customer didn't get value from Apigee based on the money he paid.

There's also MuleSoft, but I didn't see a real implementation in Jordan where there's anything extra or different from what IBM API Connect provides, and I have no idea about MuleSoft pricing.

The Jordan government accepted IBM API Connect because of the security and stability of the solution, and in terms of project implementation, it was the best project implemented that's based on DataPower and API Connect.

I've evaluated X-Ray, WSO2, Software AG, Oracle, DataPower, and Apigee.

I haven't had a chance to compare the solution to other products yet, however, the plan is to move away from this product. We still need to do the research.

I do believe that there was an RFP process that we went through as part of the selection for this tool. I do not know which other vendors were on the short list.
Usually, our vendor selection process is quite rigid around that. Everything comes into play. Of course, there's cost but then there's, how well it's going to be supported. What does the product roadmap look like? How well does it conform to our internal technology standards? How well will it play within our environment? There's a lot of stuff there.

We have plans to upgrade from this solution. We are upgrading to ensure that we have a supported version late next year, in November or December, and are evaluating alternative solutions in the market. 

Another team selected the product.

We looked at other solutions, namely Apigee. However, we didn't choose them; we are not taking it.

We have a lot of other IBM products, so it is much easier for us to have one vendor instead of multiple sets of products.

We did evaluate a lot of other options. We were led by Gartner and Forrester with regards to that, and then we did site visits to other companies that implemented products, and we had a look at their solution. We spoke to some of their staff. Based on that, we did the due diligence, and then we selected the product. This solution came out on top.

We do have other vendors that we use. However, the majority of our integration is on IBM.

We evaluated API Connect and Apigee. API is designed to be a comprehensive solution for building and managing API with features for designing, development, and distinct publishing APIs, as well as for managing the life cycle of API and enforcing security. Apigee on the other hand is designed primarily as an API management platform while focused on securing and scaling APIs for use by extended developers. Ultimately, the best platform will be the one suited to your specific needs and use cases. 

API Connect is a standalone platform, which means it may require additional integration with other tools in order to support the range of API developments. API Connect is designed to support the management of large numbers of APIs but may struggle to handle large volumes of traffic or very complex APIs.

I would think customer service and trust are important when deciding which vendor to choose. IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft were on our evaluation list. We've been with IBM for many years now, so we'll stay with IBM. We work very closely with IBM on their product and they're very good support, so when we run into issues, they are there to help.

We also looked at:

• MuleSoft
• Kong
• Gravitee
• KrankenD
• WSO2

There are several other solutions that we evaluated but it depends on the capability that we are looking at.

Initially, we started off with one solution and then, moved on to another, as we found out that it's not helping us.

We do several things before selecting a vendor. It's not in my purview, but we do the product evaluation as well. Obviously, IBM is a big vendor and we are a big shop of IBM.

We looked at several other solutions, i.e., both IBM and non-IBM products. However, since we had already used IBM DataPower, we thought we could reuse the same infrastructure. API Connect has DataPower built-in to it, thus we tried to reuse some of the existing functionalities.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the product's support and operations.

We didn’t look at other vendors.

I am also familiar with Xware and WSO2 API Manager. They have a different type of development cycle and features compared to API Connect. It's on the development side that they're different. It depends on the type of application.

Right now, we are evaluating other options, including Axway, Apigee, and Tyke.

No.

Microsoft, IBM and CA Layer 7. IBM had the most capabilities that were based on IBM DataPower and could fulfill all of our requirements, even though the timescale was longer than we expected it to be.

When considering a vendor we just go for an industry leader, making sure that their technology stack aligns with our technology stack. We look at their reputation and how good the support is with the other products and what kind of relationship we have with account managers from that organization.

We also looked at WS02 which was way too complex and needed almost 14-15 VMs to run. As we had Datapower, it was a natural choice for us.

Before choosing IBM API Connect, we looked at 3scale API and API G-Box.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated CA Layer 7, Akana, and Mashery.

No we didn't. Maybe ESB (Enterprise Service Bus which we already use) is one of the solutions for exposing different kind of web or other services for sharing usage data but we realized that API management will be more useful for our wider purposes.

I proposed to the client that they use the cloud-native API gateway in Azure or in AWS, however, they wanted to go for the API Connect.

The integration is quite fast compared to others. Other companies combine their API platforms, but API Connect is as straightforward as you can get it. 

Oracle doesn't understand the different personas that need to be defined. This is why API Connect is superior to it.

Microsoft is extremely cheap compared API Connect. We are reviewing their solution in comparison to API Connect.

We are also evaluating Apigee. We aren't happy with the portal experience in IBM API Connect, and it looks like the theme implementation and customization in Apigee is much more attractive. This is why we are doing a comparative study of Apigee and IBM API Connect, to see if Apigee would be a better long-term API management platform. We want to see if our customization experience with IBM will be similar to Apigee or if it will be much simpler. 

Initially, we did not do any exhaustive research on competing products. We are looking at the market more in-depth now. I think that API Connect is too expensive for us. For some companies that have a higher demand for using this type of product, this may be a good solution. We do not have a lot of projects of this type, so we are looking for some other solution that is cheaper for the long-term. It has to be good enough and have the proper security constraints to meet client needs. Our research into other products has not really narrowed the field yet.   

We've played around with other API managers, like Tyk, and the setup is much simpler. 

The reason why we took IBM was because of its resilience and name brand. Our clients trust the fact that we are not just going for an open source or free solution.

One of the key selling points is the easy analytics to be able to analyze what we are getting. We played around with Tyk, but we didn't see any analytics with them. E.g., we tried to connect Tyk to our Microsoft Power BI so we could use that. This feature comes standard with IBM, that's why we're sticking to it.

We have not done extensive checks on Azure because our first client that we onboarded was Google. So, we never really explored Azure that much. In the next six months, we may be exploring Azure so we can have everything in the same space.

Yeah, I can't recall the name, but we are an IBM facility, so we just figured it made more sense for us to go with this package.