DataPower

Official IBM DataPower Gateway training

DataPower is the gateway that sits in front of your services: it terminates SSL, checks who is calling and with what permission, validates and transforms the messages, and lets through only what should get through. It comes as a physical appliance, as a Linux application, as a virtual edition or in a container, and is administered through the WebGUI, the command line and the XML Management interface. The current physical appliance is the X4, available since 26 March 2026.

It should not be confused with API Connect: DataPower is the gateway that enforces security, while API Connect is API lifecycle management, with its portal and consumption plans. In many installations they live together, with DataPower acting as the API Connect gateway.

Which release you are on, and until when

  • 11.0 — available since March 2026.
  • 10.6 LTS — supported.
  • 10.5 LTS — support ends on 30 September 2026.
  • 7.x — unsupported: 7.7 was withdrawn in April 2023 and the earlier ones before that.

Running out of support matters more here than elsewhere: DataPower is the very box protecting everything behind it, and with no new firmware there is no fix for whatever vulnerability turns up. If you are on 10.5 the move will not wait much longer, and if you are still on 7.x you have gone three years without patches. We deliver the training on your release either way: whoever keeps the box running needs to know it, supported or not.

The ideal path

For a team taking on a newly arrived DataPower, the order that works is: version 10 administration (WE531G) to drive the appliance and its three interfaces, then service development (WE751G) to build on top of it. Five days between the two, and that is enough to keep an installation running.

From there you add whichever one-day course matches what you publish: web services if the integration is SOAP, REST and JOSE if it is JSON, AAA if the problem is who is allowed to call.

By level

Beginner. Administration of DataPower Gateway 10. No previous DataPower administration needed; being comfortable with networking and certificates is.

Intermediate. Service development, the backbone: service structure, multi-protocol gateway, error handling and monitoring. Plus web services and REST and JOSE, one day each, depending on the kind of integration.

Expert. AAA, OAuth and OIDC, where access control gets built for APIs exposed to third parties, and where improvising costs the most.

Administering the appliance

Building services on top

The three one-day courses build on the fundamentals one and can be chained in the same week depending on what you run: SOAP integrations, the web services course; JSON, REST and JOSE; an authorisation problem, AAA.

How they are delivered

We are an IBM Business Partner: the material and labs are the official ones and our own engineers teach them, at your premises or remotely with a live instructor. The exercises are built on the firmware you actually run, not the one in the manual.

Tell us which release your appliances run and what you publish with them — SOAP, REST or both — and we will come back with which course applies, in what order, and how many days it adds up to.