ESB Product Consideration: DataPower vs Message Broker

Back to a number of years ago, when IBM WebSphere DataPower just got into market, I was one of the technical resources involving initially in the DataPower service offering in IBM GTS (global technology services, not IBM software group). My early involvement in DataPower was based on the judgment and belief that it is a very powerful product, and would be loved by IT. I also mentioned to people many times that DataPower will eat the integration pie that primarily enjoyed by IBM WebSphere Message Broker.

However, the invasion of DataPower into the territory of Message Broker hasn’t been seen until recently. One of the reasons seems to me that the DataPower has been stamped as a hardware appliance.  Due to it, probably (dumb) people would think that it is something like F5 or load balancer. This is kind of misunderstanding that was really an insult to this great product (it may also be an IBM’s problem on how to brand it, I believe).

From my perspective, the greatness about DataPower (in addition to all IBM marketing materials about its capabilities) is the fast prototype & development and easy ongoing management. This is a very convincing argument when coming to the decision for company to make selection of products/tools for their IT needs (especially ESB & enterprise integration). In addition, it is pretty much no ambiguity that DataPower can deliver what it is supposed to do and what it can do without compromising expectations (such as performance).

On the other side, Message Broker is still strong with the enterprise integration such as SAP, Sieble & PeopleSoft (relying on adapters) and the support of data formats. But, there are many overlapped functionalities between DataPower and Message Broker. On top of that, DataPower can do a few things much better… Below is the comparison between DataPower and Message Broker.

Message Broker

DataPower

Integrating and leveraging the WebSphere MQ messaging infrastructure. Supports different protocols such as MQ, JMS, HTTP(S), Web Services, ftp, and convert one to the other. Supports a wide range of data formats, including XML, binary (COBOL, C), positional/delimited, and industry formats (EDI, SWIFT), and convert one to the other. Provides a number of capabilities to customize mediation, including C/C++, ESQL, Java, XSLT, and PHP. WebSphere Adapters for enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft and Siebel). Offers z/OS clients platform-specific benefits (CICS, VSAM).

Similar to Message Broker, DataPower can do any-to-any transformation (in theory, Yes. But in practice, you may need to use WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX)). Supports almost every security protocols and different authentication/authorization schemas, such as Web Service security/policy, TLS/SSL, SAML, LDAP, RADIUS, etc. Provides field level security: WS-security down to the individual operation, encrypt & sign individual fields, nonrepudiation. Data validation, parsing and filtering, and meta data manipulation. Transport level protocol conversions from any-to-any.