IBM B2B Integrator Reviews

IBM B2B Integrator is primarily used for EDI transmissions, audits, and VDA transactions.

We have application developers, EDI mapping experts, system administrators, and architects using this solution.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The most valuable features are the flexibility and the range of EDI standards that IBM Sterling can handle. It's easy to design a process and streamline the VDA transaction. There are different possibilities for connectivity. IBM handles almost all communication protocols and comes with an adapter. It's easy to set up. The range of connectivity and data handling is really good compared to other products.

The one thing that is lacking is easy visibility. It's hard to provide business users with a view into the statuses of their transactions.

The EDI translation mapping could be more simplified with more templates.

I have used this solution for several years.

It has a good range of tuning possibilities. If the capacity is designed correctly, it's very stable.

The scalability is high, but the ease of scalability depends on what you're using. IBM Sterling has the container option, which you can use to auto scale, but it depends on what kind of implementation you have done.

Technical support is fairly good. I would rate them as eight out of ten.

I would rate the setup as seven out of ten. Deployment takes a maximum of six hours if you consider the step-by-step procedures.

Building the servers will take additional resources, but installation itself is a one-person job. It also depends on what kind of capacity you are implementing.

The pricing is based on how many cores are used and the type of cores. They have something called PVU, process value units, which are based on the chip set and the number of chip sets being used for capacity. There are different pricing models, including an enterprise edition.

For a company that's a typical size, the cost is not significant.

I would rate this solution as seven out of ten, due to the lack of visibility and mapping.

We use B2B Integrator to collect files locally and send them to external business partners, like the national banks. For example, the company regularly sends financial reports to the national central bank. In short, it's for data exchange between companies. I previously worked for an automotive company, and we used B2B Integrator to exchange data with the parts supplier.

B2B Integrator is multi-platform, so it can be integrated with Windows, Unix, or whatever, and it can work with almost all programming languages. It can also transfer a lot of data in a short time. For instance, a system I recently implemented exchanges about 20 million files a day.

The user interface is outdated. B2B Integrator was developed in the United States in the nineties, and the graphical user interface hasn't improved since. It's tough because you have to program the software in XML. Nowadays, other methods are easier to work with. Programming the system is challenging. However, it's not a shortcoming for me. I think it would help if they had more documentation, too. 

I've been using B2B Integrator for about 10 years.

I would rate B2B Integrator eight out of 10 for performance but 10 out of 10 for stability. 

B2B Integrator is highly scalable. I give it a 10 out of 10 for scalability. 

IBM support is another one of B2B Integrator's advantages. Support is crucial for large enterprises, and this is a product primarily used in big corporations.

I have some experience with a similar product called Axway File Gateway, but not too much. Axway is easier to set up. Apart from that, I'd say that they're more or less the same program. Nonetheless, I would still go for IBM because the aftersales service of Axway needs some improvement.

The initial deployment is very complex. I would rate it 10 out of 10 for complexity. The installation itself is pretty straightforward, it's hard to configure the business flows, and it takes a lot of time. 

The programming interface is old. You need to program everything in XML and XSLT, and that's an old-fashioned way to do things. It took me an entire year to fully deploy the system in a corporation of 60,000 employees. We're talking about 20,000 files a day. We have a team for deployment and maintenance, but the product doesn't require much maintenance — only regular updates. For updates and releases, the product manages itself. 

B2B Integrator is expensive, but it's worth it. I rate the price 10 out of 10 for the most expensive, but it's also the best product for what it does. The only additional cost is the support contract.  

I rate B2B Integrator nine out of 10. If you are implementing B2B Integrator, you should have good programmers and a solid system administration team. It's also better to outsource the system setup.

There are many benefits of this product.

One unique instance was when the transaction mapping and transmissions both happened in the same application.

We were able to translate the transaction from X12 to the application and vice versa. We were also able to communicate with the internal as well as the external application, i.e., with various up-to-date protocols available in the market.

The IBM B2B Integrator tool, as the name suggests, can be used to manage your trading partner's community and connections centrally, from one single application.

With the most recent releases of this product, the installation and administration have become much more complex.

After SI v5.2.4 there are major changes happened to the product with some new features and capabilities., which in turn are good. With features like advance communication, High Availability etc. installation and management of the tool has become little complex. Introduction of installation manager was not a conventional method of B2Bi installation. Everything comes with the price. If you want your infrastructure to be up to date and available all the time, Complexity is something you have to take up with it.

I would like to see that more simplified for the users.

I have used this solution for more than 10 years now. I still think its pretty good and up to the date solutions for many but not limited to MFT, EDI etc.solutions

We have not experienced any major issues in terms of the stability. There is continuous support that we receive from IBM.

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent, as long as you are covered with your contract.

I was not involved in the initial setup, as it was done in 2005. However, I was part of the upgrade many times. As we are moving forward, it has started to become a complex procedure.

The pricing is a bit on the higher side for a small organization. If you have a large organization and have scope for using other IBM products, then you have a chance to negotiate with them.

We did not evaluate any other products before the choosing this one.

During the upgrade, we gave a thought to the Oracle Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution for the same purpose.

You should evaluate your business, as the statistics play an important role in deciding about this product. If you study the requirements in detail, then you will reduce the chances of failure quite a bit.

IBM B2B Integrator is a great tool, robust, reliable, low-maintenance, and ideal solution.

The product is an ideal tool for extracting templates and supporting all B2B EDI standards.

API integration could be improved. The legacy system could be on the cloud.

I have been using IBM B2B Integrator for ten years.

The product is very stable. I rate its stability a nine out of ten.

The product is very reliable because five or more GB files process well in the cloud. It takes time, but it doesn't hang. It starts lagging if you have a low disk space in the cloud and load more than five MB of files.

We have around 800 users using this solution.

The technical support services need improvement in terms of response time.

Neutral

I've worked with Dell Boomi. It is good for those who have less technical knowledge. IBM, Boomi, and MuleSoft have API advantages.

The initial setup process is easy if you know the product well.

We did the deployment by ourselves.

The product costs more than 40K.

I recommend IBM B2B Integrator only if they have an alternate API-based B2B solution. It is a very robust product but unsuitable for API integration.

Overall, I rate it a seven out of ten.

The solution is useful for transferring files from one format to another format. Also, the solution is useful in translation.

The seamless transmission and translation are the features that I found most valuable in the solution.

There are a couple of areas in the solution which could be improved. When dealing with huge flows, the solution lags, causing issues in its speed. There are also some features in the solution that are not user-friendly, like code lists with no search options. So, we must navigate hundreds of pages to check for one entry. In a few areas, the solution lacks user-friendliness.

I have experience using IBM B2B Integrator for six years. Our company has been using IBM B2B Integrator Version 5.2.6, which we migrated to around six months ago.

Even though I don't have much experience with other integration tools, the stability of the IBM B2B Integrator is pretty good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution between six and a half to seven out of ten since it can be better.

Scalability-wise, it is a good solution. My lack of experience with other integration tools makes comparing its scalability with other solutions difficult. Also, there are a good number of users using the solution in my company, and we do plan to increase the number of users.

I have contacted the technical support team many times. I believe that the support provided by IBM is not provided directly by them. Instead, it appears that IBM has entered into a contract with a company to provide technical support on their behalf. In general, the technical support team has been good and provided our company with the required support whenever needed.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. When the installation part of the solution is considered, the solution is user-friendly. The GUI provided by the solution ensures that one can carry out the initial setup process with ease. The deployment model consists of both on-premise and the cloud. Recently, we migrated to the cloud so that the solution could be installed anywhere.

The deployment process does not take too much time. There might be a need for extra time to deploy the solution if the developers need to develop all the configurations, which is a time-consuming process. Installation or the initial setup does not take much time.

We require technical information to ensure the successful deployment and maintenance of the solution. Although the information may be present in the IBM documentation, it is not easily accessible, making it difficult to obtain the necessary details. So, a person with experience can get the technical information from the documentation. However, if the person lacks experience, it isn't easy to handle the solution.

We need a consultant with knowledge of integration and EDI-related processes to implement the solution.

An architect, specifically speaking, an EDI architect, is someone who can carry out the implementation process without any difficulty.

Licensing depends upon the package you opt for within the solution. The solution is a bit costly compared to the other integration tools in the market. Large-scale companies cannot work with smaller applications because they may face an issue with them. Though the price for the licensing of the solution could be cheaper, it is fine.

I recommend the solution for mid to large-scale companies but not small-scale companies. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

It has a number of different components that can fit together. People can use it partially or fully. It also integrates with some of the mounting tools like IBM Transformation Extender and it's a B2B Gateway rather than just a BDI translator.

They've modernized the solution recently and added some things where BDI translators have been around for a long time, and they've added things like advanced coms and global mailboxing to make it much more real-time with higher availability. So it's good value for our organization.

I think it needs some additional things like visibility. That's why we look to partners who provide that kind of visibility and I think that's something that could be changed. The product is stable but I think there are some things that they can do to enhance it, to make it a little bit more stable in terms of visibility of transactions.

Sterling B2B Integrator is a transactional tool to manage the flow of EDI centric transactions to and from your trading partners. It also works with an add-on product called ITX Advanced (ITXA).

As transactions flow through, the users would like to see the status if each of the transactions, or an analytic view of a number of transactions. For example, a user might say “tell me how many EDI claims failed validation today or this week?” Or how much order volume in terms of dollars was processed today?

I had that request from a VP of Sales when I was an EDI Coordinator. He would come by every day and ask “have we hit $1M yet in orders today?” He was not technical, and wouldn’t be able to run queries on a database, for example, so if the tool could give a dashboard with the transaction totals, both in physical transactions (i.e. 15,783 POs today) as well as business level information (those PO’s totaled $1.3M in orders, or $450,883 for product A, and $78,932 for product B, etc.), that would be valuable to business users.

Some of IBM’s partners, like Lightwell and CoEnterprise, have been building these dashboards as part of their offering as they have seen a gap in the IBM product.

For example, CoEnterprise offers a solution called Syncrofy to do this.

It's pretty stable.

It scales pretty well.

Sometimes it's hard to get through to the right people in support. It takes some time. My questions tend to be beyond Level 1, so I may need to get to the higher levels of support which can take some time and be a little frustrating.

It was already in place when I got here. I know a lot of tools in this area have been around for a long time and they didn't really change that much. IBM has modernized it a fair bit so you make sure you're keeping up with changes in the industry.

I would say to be careful with the visibility. I think they're going in the right direction in a lot of ways, depending on the transformation that you need. We've got a built-in to the Sterling B2B product, which is good for basic transformation and mapping, but anything advanced would probably require something superior.

The IBM B2B Integrator is going to be a middleware point of contact for us. It's helping us in terms of file transfer communication. There is a file gateway, which is built on B2B Integrator, which allows us to build out some custom protocols based on our requirements. That would be any of the use cases; FTP, SFTP, S2 and all kinds of communications.

I believe that the translation part is the best thing, with which we can do a lot of custom business processes. It will help us to build a translation specific to our partner, specific to our port, or specific to EDA testings. It's going to help us a lot in translations, especially in terms of converting the standard EDA documents to the internal file formats or vice versa (back to EDA).

I started working as a developer and now, I'm a solution architect. All this while, I have been using it, for over 13 years; this is a great tool.

There's a lot still to be improved in the component, as there are many challenges in terms of B2B tools. One of the challenges was on the Sterling side, since I love to have translations with XLS. So, if you have a Word document and an XLS file, then there is no conversion right now, which is a standard way of doing it. It's not happening anywhere in the world, i.e., anywhere in the B2B tools, so I'd love to have that kind feature soon.

I've been working on this tool for the past 13 years.

The stability of the solution totally depends upon a company and as to what they are looking at the moment. Right now, we are looking at the Sterling B2B solution, so it is good.

The scalability is also good.

The technical support is good. We just have to be conscious on the escalation part, i.e., if it's a Level 1 or Level 2. Otherwise, they are good and prompt.

Previously, we were using Mercator, which is now acquired by IBM and now known as IBM WTX/IBM ITX.

We did a market research and then found out that this is going to be the less expensive solution, in terms of the cost, as compared to the other products.

When selecting a vendor, we just want the vendor to be flexible and who can go with a lot of iterations; and the cost; and then who has the technical capabilities; and then who is very strong in communicating things; and being fair in terms of the cost. We have a lot of issues in terms of dealing with the vendors, since their billing prices are very high.

We chose IBM because it's a great tool and is going to support us to do a lot of internal completion of the translation piece. Also, cost-wise, it's less compared to the other products.

Right now, we have Shree Consulting and we have Lightwell our short list; that's all I know.

It can do everything. Now that IBM is acquiring the ITX/ WTX, it's going to be a next generation tool. As long you add some capabilities to it, it's going to be good solution.

You should go for it!

Both data transmission and data transformation are the two very, very critical features of this application.

We use a Sterling B2B Integrator file transfer management solution; a B2B solution, or like an EDI solution. As a pharma company, we deal with a lot of external trading partners. It can be suppliers or EDI partners, where we exchange all the data. So when we are exchanging the data, we have to keep to certain standards. In North America, we use the ANSI X12 standard, where data is converted from one format to another and then sent out to the trading partners. We use Sterling Integrator to do the data transformation, as well as data transmission to send the files off to them. This application supports various communication protocols, like FTPS. Sometimes the vendors are not really tech savvy, because you're talking about a scientist who is not really tech savvy. For them, we provide a URL where they can simply log in using their credentials and upload their research files. This is the application that we use to route the files.

When it comes to data transformation, it's very flexible. It allows us to convert from any format to any format, such as from CSV to XML, or flat file to positional, or whatever. And the fact that it supports a good number of communication protocols make it easy because most of the customers don't feel comfortable using FTP or open protocols. This gives us the file technology to support web services. On both ends, it's the flexibility that makes it stand out from the others.

I would like more visibility, because IBM has partnered with other companies that sell frameworks. So I thought if IBM can invest more on providing that visibility, having us install a third-party framework, would be a nice feature that IBM could seriously think about.

We never had any major stability issues, to be frank. We had only one issue that was more in the infrastructure, but the system has been stable for a pretty long time. We haven't had a need to upgrade the system because it was that stable. The only issue is that in the current version that we are on, one of the security features is not available. In order to get new features that are available, we are thinking about upgrading. But, other than that, from the stability standpoint, it's pretty stable; no issues at all.

We have already installed it on a four-node cluster, so it's pretty scalable. Down the line, if there is a need, we can simply add two more nodes without complicating it. We could definitely scale it, so that's not a big deal.

We have been acquired by another company, so we already have quite a few technologies that we use for the same thing. Even for EDI, we have TIBCO and Sterling B2B. For file transfer management, we use TIBCO Business Connect and Axway Secure Transport and Sterling Integrator. So, I think we are better placed to asses which is working better. So when we gauged them, we found the Sterling Integrator is really flexible and is able to support a lot of business use cases when compared with the other technologies.

When selecting a vendor, meeting our business needs, not only the current needs but also the future needs, would be the critical thing for us. If the current needs are met but you're unable to meet the future needs, then there is no point in selecting an application that is meeting the current needs but down the line we have to look for another alternative solution. It's such a big company and we don't know what kind of requirements are coming up. So, we have these periodic sessions to get an understanding of what is coming our way. Then we asses whether we could meet those needs or not. So, that's the reason why we proceeded with the procuring of Aspera, which is used for large file transfers in terms of like, terabytes or petabytes.
So that's a solution that we use that was acquired by IBM two or three years ago. So this is what happens when we get to know what's coming our way and we know IBM or the Sterling Integrator is not used for large file transfers, we may pull out another solution that would handle that.

I was involved in the setup. I'm the one who designed it. It was pretty straightforward.

It's a case-by-case basis, so advice depends on what your needs are and what you're looking for. But if you're looking for something like data transmission and transformations, then yes, this is an ideal solution. But, if you're looking for large file transfers, then Sterling B2B is not the one. Another IBM product like Aspera is the right one. It totally depends on upon what kind of use cases you are trying to handle.