See what our customers have to say
In December, we completed our seventh annual webMethods survey, collecting very useful information from hundreds of our customers to help guide the development of new features. We truly appreciate all of you who took the time to respond. Read on to learn about how we use this valuable information to better meet your needs.
Platforms
The first series of questions was on platforms: operating systems, databases and browsers. We use this data to help us decide which platforms to support and when, and also plan for new database support as needed. Here are some key findings from 2018.
Operating systems
Red Hat® Linux® is now used by about 50% of our customers followed by Windows®. There has been a significant shift away from Solaris®, AIX® and HP UNIX® in recent years. As a result, we’ve deprecated Solaris and HP UNIX platforms for webMethods with our newer releases.
Databases
Oracle® database leads in terms of its usage with webMethods followed by SQL Server®. Usage in production environments has stayed steady during the past couple of years. We’ve also been tracking a growing interest in PostGreSQL, and this year more than 30% responses showed the need for PostGreSQL support with webMethods.
We’re happy to share we are working on supporting PostGreSQL in our core products of webMethods Integration Server and webMethods Trading Networks in the early part of 2019. More webMethods will support PostGreSQL later in the year. webMethods supports both MySQL Enterprise and Community editions. We’ve also added DB2 11.1 support for webMethods 10.1 and 10.3 per customer feedback.
Versions and upgrades
Understanding how customers adopt webMethods versions and specifically their use in production helps us plan for the future. We’ve learned adoption of new releases is excellent with more than 35% of customers already in production on version 10.1 and higher.
In the upcoming six to 12 months, more than half of our customers will be upgrading their webMethods software. More than 40% of these upgrade projects will be to webMethods version 10.3 and above.
Development and deployment
More than 50% of our customers are implementing applications using the microservices architectural style. Hence, we’ve added a whole set of new features for Microservices Runtime (MSR) in version 10.3 and will continue to enhance this product.
With the advent of serverless computing, we’re also seeing an interest in it with Amazon® Lambda and Microsoft® Azure® taking the lead. Meanwhle, Kubernetes® and RedHat OpenShift are the two leading technologies for container orchestration with webMethods.
Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube are the most popular tools being used for DevOps with webMethods.
In this survey, we also asked about node.js development and found a lot of customers would be happy to use webMethods if they had a node.js plugin. Some customers have already started doing custom node.js development to access enterprise data and resources.
Over the past few years, we’ve also learned our customers are actively evaluating container technologies. In particular, we see an uptake in the usage of container technologies especially in Docker® so we now support Docker in most webMethods products.
Cloud usage
The cloud infrastructure most preferred by webMethods customers is Amazon EC2®, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google® Cloud. Over 50% of our customers would prefer to use a private data center for webMethods applications. With our focus on cloud support with webMethods, we are working on a plan to support Google Cloud in 2019 and will support Microsoft Azure with webMethods version 10.1 onwards.
And finally…
We are grateful to everyone who responds each year to provide us this valuable feedback. If you haven’t responded to us before, please look for an email in October because your feedback makes a difference. And who knows? Maybe next year you’ll be one of the lucky winners from our prize drawing. Winners from this survey were: Olivier Bigard from Crédit Agricole Technologies & Services and Jan Matschke from Siemens AG, who won the Apple® Watch; and Asif Rahman from Staples Solutions, Scott Bechtel from Tractor Supply, Farid from Fabbrica d'armi Pietro Beretta and Debapriyo Dasgupta from STMicroelectronics in India, who won gift cards.