IBM Cloud Pak for Applications vs. Progress Telerik

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is clearly suitable for modernizing the WebSphere runtime from the heavy, complex and expensive WAS-ND, and to a lesser extent WAS-base, to the super simple, fast and lightweight WebSphere Liberty runtime. I guarantee, once you start using Liberty you'll never look back. Enough cannot be said about how awesome Transformation Advisor is. The output analysis it produces, along with the migration plan and associated artifacts, considerably simplifies both the decision-making process surrounding modernization and subsequent implementation. Without TA we would've made bad decisions by blindly picking unsuitable apps for moving from WAS to Liberty. Using the results from TA we've excluded multiple WAS apps from our immediate plans to migrate to Liberty, saving time and effort that probably would have resulted in a failed migration. We recently used Transformation Advisor to help us successfully migrate an app from Tomcat to WebSphere Liberty. We needed to make some changes to the Tomcat app, but TA helped highlight these required changes. Without TA I'm not sure we would have succeeded.

Incentivized

Progress Telerik UI is one of the best web design and development solutions for Dot Net based applications. It has extensible support for ASP.NET Core, C#, WCF, and ASP.NET WebForms. It overall improves the design structure for the applications and provides multiple customization options to meet the requirements of clients and end-users.

Incentivized

• WebSphere Liberty for lighter footprint
• Transformation Advisor
• Mono2Micro
• Customer can benefit from their investment by optimizing license offerings in IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

Incentivized

• Telerik enables rapid application development for the demonstration of concepts.
• It provides a good set of themes and functional additions to a UI development environment.
• Each control is packed with valuable features.
• The support team is responsive and very knowledgeable about making their product work in whatever situation you need.

Incentivized

• While the licensing is considerably simplified than it used to be, I still find it somewhat confusing. For example, WebSphere Liberty Core has an 8:1 VPC ratio. This is clear when dealing with VMs but it is still not clear to me as to whether we get an 8:1 ratio when running on OpenShift or whether we need to purchase additional OpenShift licenses to support running WebSphere Liberty Core in OpenShift.
• Not so much related to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, but while Transformation Advisor is an indispensable tool to help modernize to the WebSphere Liberty runtime, I wish we could run it against WebSphere Liberty itself. The reason being, we are now using TA as a single repository for our configurations. TA also highlights many potential issues when migrating to Liberty; these issues may also be applicable for apps already running in Liberty, we just don't know it yet.

Incentivized

• I have not worked with the App Builder but I think a GUI for dragging and dropping components to build a web page would be great.
• In addition to the app builder there should some tools to design a responsive web application to see the results for different screen sizes.

Incentivized

The Telerik UI has become part of our staple development tools. We can not be as productive without the feature set available to us in the Telerik UI ASP.NET AJAX control package.

The UX of their UI is very well thought out, the micro-interactions are intuitive - thus great for your end user as less training is needed. Using the software, there [are] loads to get you going, you can download their whole demo site and see how each demo works. There is more now on github to get you started, also much on an awesome CDN that's well bedded in so your app is speedy and up to date.

Progress Telerik UI customer support is pretty good. The ticketing system allows a thread of questions, answers, and attachments of code and screenshots. Response time is fairly quick and often has code snippets or pointers to online examples that could be relevant. There is a large amount of community support forums to get answers or post questions. In addition there is a forum of posted code samples for the various controls. The Progress update tool easily tells you what products have been updated and allows you to install the updates on your development system. Release notes can be displayed to see what's new.

Incentivized

The controls work very well as long as they are used as intended. Built-in functionality should be used whenever possible,

Incentivized

Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.

Incentivized

The Telerik controls were just easier for us to use and implement. Our evaluation of control packages was over 9 years ago, so it is hard to recall the major differences. Generally, the team preferred what Telerik had to offer, particularly the fact that the bundle provided controls, not just for the ASP.NET context, but also Windows applications, and the cross-platform contexts as well.

• Increased Development Efficiency
• Cost Reduction in Infrastructure Management
• Enhanced Application Performance and Reliability

Incentivized

• Provides rapid development - it has helped me create multiple web applications in MVC and Angular within a one-month time frame.
• Our clients were facing challenges (taking time to load applications, grid view, and generating reports ) with asp.net web applications. Using Kendo UI we have migrated the ASP.NET application to MVC within a one-month time frame. The client was very happy with the application's performance and responsive UI.

Incentivized