IBM DataPower Gateway vs. OCI API Management

WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.

Incentivized

Oracle API Manager is well suited in a business or company that make use of Apis to facilitate access of backend services and data sources by the staff or customers or both. It is also imported in situations where all actions in a system need to be attributed to specific users.

Incentivized

• The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
• DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
• The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.

Incentivized

• API Manager allows for REST and SOAP API's to be easily created and tracked
• API Manager allows for only certain people/applications to use the API (does this thru a subscriber service it provides)
• It also publishes the API's it is tracking so developers can easily know what interfaces already exist.
• The monitoring ability is a nice feature. The admin person can easily see how and where the APIs are currently being used

Incentivized

• The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
• IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
• Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.

Incentivized

• Absence of Role-Based Access. A finer grain control on what type of users can call certain API Endpoints is needed.
• Performance with third-party databases isn't as fast as using Oracle Database.
• Long learning curve. Although Oracle API Manager provides performance and a vast deal of features, a certain level of expertise is required to effectively make use of them.

Cost of the appliance

Incentivized

Oracle API Manager is much easier to learn and understand then IBM Data Power Gateway and IBM API Connect. We selected Oracle API Manager in our company because to have a good intuitive interface with drag and drop features and because beginners and easily get up to speed to use this tool.

Incentivized

• It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
• We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
• It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.

Incentivized

• Oracle API Manager supports both REST & SOAP API's.
• Secure and attributable connection to back-end services and data sources. In addition to creating API's for querying data, you can also create API endpoints that can manipulate the data in the back-end databases.
• Although Oracle API Manager provides performance and a vast deal of features, to start with it is really important you train your people working on development, deployment and administrators to effectively use Oracle API Manager.

Incentivized