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Key Findings: webMethods Customer Survey

The webMethods 2019 Annual Customer Survey is available now.

David Overos David Overos

The webMethods Annual Customer Survey is a valuable part of our commitment to supporting our customers.

Our 2019 survey was competed in December, collecting some very useful information from customers across the globe. 

Here are the key findings:

Platforms

We asked participants questions 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 to plan for new database support as needed.

  • 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. 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®. 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 have also added support for SQL Server on Azure based on the feedback received from customers. This support will be for the SQL Server on Azure – managed instance and SQL server hosted on Azure. Along with that, we have added support for MySQL 8.0 Community edition.

  • Versions and Upgrades

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. In the upcoming six to 12 months, more than half of our customers will be upgrading their webMethods software – out of which over 40% of these will be to the webMethods version 10.5 and above. 

  • Development and Deployment

More than 50% of our customers are implementing applications using the Microservices architectural style, hence we have added a whole set of new features for Microservices Runtime (MSR) in version 10.5 and will continue to enhance this product.

Microservices have entered not only the application development space but also integration. 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.

Service Mesh

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

Jenkins, Maven and SonarQube are the most popular tools being used for DevOps with webMethods.

AgileApps

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.

We learned from our survey that customers are actively evaluating container technologies and we see an uptake in the usage of container technologies, especially in Docker. We are now providing Docker support for most of the webMethods products.

  • Cloud Usage

Cloud infrastructure that is mostly preferred by webMethods customers is Amazon EC2, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud platform. 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 supporting webMethods products version 10.3 and higher on Microsoft Azure.

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