Shaping the future of webMethods

We completed our eighth annual webMethods Customer Survey in December 2019, collecting very useful information from customers across the globe. We truly appreciate all of you who took the time to respond to us. Read on to learn about how we use this valuable information to better meet your needs.

Platforms

The first series of questions is about all sorts of platforms: operating systems, databases, browsers, etc. We use this data to help us decide which platforms to support and when, and also to plan for new database support as needed. Here are some key findings from this year:

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. Following the decrease, we have 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® - their usage in production environments has stayed steady in the results of the last surveys. There has been a growing interest in PostGreSQL over the past couple of years and we have now added this database as a standard supported for webMethods products.

We are happy to share that we have also added support for SQL Server on Azure based on the feedback received from our customers. This support will be for the SQL Server on Azure both as a managed instance and SQL server hosted on Azure. Along with that, support for MySQL 8.0 Community edition will also be available. 

Versions and Upgrades

It is valuable for us to understand the adoption of the various versions of webMethods and specifically of their usage in production. We have learned that there is an excellent level of adoption of new releases, with more than 45% of customers already in production on webMethods version 10.3 and higher.

And, in the upcoming 6 to 12 months, more than half of our customers will be upgrading their webMethods software - out of which over 40% of these upgrade projects will be to the webMethods version 10.5 and above.  

Development and Deployment

Microservices

As more than 50% of webMethods users are implementing applications using the Microservices architectural style, a whole set of new features and enhancements has been added for Microservices Runtime (MSR) in version 10.5.

Microservices have entered not only the application development but also the integration space. Container orchestration solutions such as Kubernetes and OpenShift are becoming a standard for running distributed architectures. They do not solve everything, though, and are not easy to run. That’s why Service Mesh solutions have emerged with the promise to close all the gaps in container orchestration and make the process easier. They are yet to deliver on the promise but show some potential.

According to our results, one of the most popular service mesh implementations available is Istio. It is often quoted by webMethods customers and we’re seeing competitors implement basic integrations with it. Some customers have also shown interest in Service Mesh architecture such as Istio and Google gRPC. The API Management team has been working on having a real answer to the problem that we see as a lack of application-level awareness in Service Mesh.

We’re glad to announce our new offering, AppMesh, which allows webMethods API Gateway to serve as a control plane and introspect services available in Istio. AppMesh helps API teams expose APIs from services in Istio with proper documentation and application level enforcements that Istio will not be able to do. It can also inject our Microgateway into running microservices so that these enforcements (and more, such as analytics) are possible.

DevOps

Jenkins, Maven, and SonarQube have been voted as the most popular tools being used for DevOps with webMethods. 

Low-code Applications

In this survey, we also targeted a question to customers who are interested in building low-code apps along with integration flows. We found that one of the most popular tools is webMethods AgileApps for building low-code apps. 

Containerization

Another learning from the 2019 webMethods survey is that customers are actively evaluating containerization and we see an uptake in the usage of container technologies, especially in Docker. Docker support is now available for most of the webMethods products.

Cloud Usage 

The cloud infrastructure that is mostly preferred by webMethods customers is Amazon EC2, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platform. However, over 50% of our customers would prefer to use a private data center for webMethods applications. With increased focus on Cloud support with webMethods, we are supporting webMethods products version 10.3 and higher on Microsoft Azure.

And finally for the winners of our survey raffle...

We’re delighted to announce this year’s winners of the raffle included Ruloff Kristinsson and Joko Kurniwan, among others.

The webMethods product team is very grateful to everyone who provides us with this valuable feedback every year. If you did not respond last time, do look out for an email around the beginning of September as your feedback does make a difference. And, maybe next year you will win the prize draw!