IBM B2B Integrator Reviews

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.

The solution covers a multitude of functions including file interchange between applications. That includes all the EDI flows. It can also be used in finance providing support for all the finance standards. Above all, this is a product for the interchange of files between internal applications and external. We are gold partners with IBM and I'm the head of the division. 

This product is very flexible, it allows you to implement different flows on the same infrastructure. It has the power to support every layer of security required on the market. It includes the option to integrate software to sign, authenticate and encrypt. For this reason, it's the most commonly used product of its kind in the banking sector because it allows you to interchange every type of file with four levels of security as well as having the ability to handle huge files. 

The web interface of B2B is quite ancient and not particularly user-friendly. It's quite difficult to navigate within the dashboard of the product and understand the features. Whenever they bring out a new version, the new features are not documented for the first month although they are visible. I can try using them but it's really not possible without the documentation which really needs to be provided in tandem with the new features. Additional features I'd like to see are the integration of some external tools for API management. IBM has a lot of such tools and some could easily be integrated.

I've been using this solution for 16 years. 

The solution is generally stable. When it's not, this is usually not related to the product. It may be that there are some database issues.

The solution is easily scalable, horizontally and vertically, and in every typeof container, whether on-prem or cloud. 

The technical support is very good. 

The complexity of the deployment really depends on the situation. It's quite similar to Software AG in those terms. It requires the correct operating system, availability of the database, firewalls must be open, etc. We sometimes lose time because not all the system requirements are correctly handled by the customer. A regular deployment can be completed in a week, and a more complex one, anywhere up to three weeks. The organizations are generally mid to enterprise-size and can have thousands of users. We might use up to eight engineers for the largest deployments and we cover a very huge infrastructure. We also provide support to our customers. 

ROI is variable. Some customers have been able to get a return on investment in two months, and some others in one year which is also good.

This is the most expensive solution of its kind in the market, but it's also the Ferrari of the market. The pricing is quite flexible, particularly when it comes to new customers or smaller organizations. They have a very intelligent policy for attracting new customers that includes a variety of licensing modules.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

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.

We're using this product for managed file transfer. This gives you the ability to isolate a source system and a target system. You stick a Sterling managed file transfer in the middle, which allows you to deploy that isolation. It gives you the ability to replay the data in case of a failure, allows you to retry, and gives you extensive error notification.

It has many more capabilities, but we are using it as a managed file console. Sterling is a full B2B platform. This means you can do a lot of data transformation and things like that.

This has become our new file hub. Any data coming from any partner first hits Sterling. It provides a whole security layer. It has become our security. A component of Sterling is housed in the so-called “DMZ”, demilitarized zone.

A simple advantage is you are providing a proxy. This means that the outside world does not know where they are sending their data. They send it to Sterling. Sterling manages the data and determines where it goes in the environment.

Due to the way Sterling is designed, you do not open your firewalls for incoming streams at all. Sterling has a proprietary way of communicating between the secure network and the DMZ that allows you to completely protect your environment from outside attacks.

It is now our core managed file transfer platform.

Better integration with other IBM products is definitely the main piece with room for improvement.

It's very stable, but it's got its quirks. For example, all the file-based data is stored in a database.

There is an option for a user file system, but the recommended approach by IBM is primarily to use a database to store all the file data. This is not an optimum way to do things. We're already running into a lot of database space issues, in archiving, etc. But, again, that is implementation criteria.

Scalability is perfectly fine. You can do whatever you want. You can scale it up as much as you want. We're nowhere near being in a position where we will be running into capacity issues. However, I believe it's highly scalable.

We were using a simple FTP server that was sitting in the DMZ. We really needed a fully functioning platform and managed file transfer. This solution provided that.

We changed solutions because we looked at the stability of the product and the company's commitment to it.

We looked at what we were replacing in terms of our core integration product, which was already a product that IBM had acquired. It had to become an IBM product.

Certain parts of what we had in the environment were maybe usable by IBM. The reusability of its SAP infrastructure was a key decision.

I was involved in the setup. It was very complex.

Different components need to be in the DMZ. There is the authentication piece, which probably requires integration with something like Active Directory, which we didn't go with.

We're using Sterling's own data store. The sheer number of pieces and the communication, especially the communication between Sterling and IBM's other products, is not evolved because IBM acquired this company recently, relatively speaking. The integration between its core ESB and Sterling is not well defined.

In fact, we went down one route by using Connect:Direct. We actually had to abandon it after putting in a substantial amount of work. We then went with a simple FTP approach after that.

It seems like Sterling continues to operate as a very independent company within IBM, and that's a problem.

We evaluated Oracle, IBM, and SAP.

In terms of selecting a vendor, we certainly look at their reputation and the quality of their products. We look at their ability to stand behind their products and improve them. IBM is very committed to their products, their platform, and building it.

If you are looking at the solution as a managed file transfer tool, it does the job. There are probably similar products out there, just from an MFT perspective.

Sterling has integrated itself as a B2B platform. This is excellent, because it has many capabilities that we are not using currently. It is a full replacement for EDI, but we're not using it currently. 

I know that the product is very capable. IBM needs to integrate it better into their portfolio of other products in order to make it work better.

I would recommend it, but be careful because it is complex and there are gaps in compatibility.

Any B2B integration, EDI & MFT

The application's performance is based on the database. It is the most competitive product currently available in the market if you compare it with any other MFT or integration products.

Connect:Direct and Sterling File Gateway are the products most banks use. These two products are effectively used for managed and secure file transfers. IBM B2B Integrator is used mostly by retailers and logistics companies.

The challenge is there is no related transaction stored in the database because it's an OLTP application.

We have been using this solution for more than 20 years. It is on private cloud, public cloud and on-premises. Most of the customers use on-premises. They also have a product called Global Mailbox, which is used for metadata between two data centres. They also provide high availability.

It can scale horizontally as well as vertically as a cluster. I have observed at least one twister with ten notes up and running. It is most suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, and it is better to go for their tax model.

The technical support is good, and I rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is simple to install. Its placement is very simple. However, for implementation and maintenance, you need some technical knowledge. So it may be a bit complex for basic users.

The initial investment is high, but the renewable cost is much cheaper compared to other products.

We compared three top products, but IBM is a unique solution on the market. They have been on the market for over three decades, and the product stability and capability are great.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. They should add a good dashboard that can do one single review for all the transactions. Users can see how many transactions happen and the status. So, there is no single-view dashboard where businesses can access and view.

It's a very flexible product. It's stable and it's been around for many, many years. We were a Gentran NT user previously. We moved over to Sterling Integrator and we are very happy with the translation part of it. We don't use it for communication but we're happy with the translation capability.

It helps us to consolidate multiple divisions into one Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) source. We had multiple EDI teams at one point on the mainframe and we converted them all into one single center of excellence for Sterling Integrator and EDI.

I think probably the envelope setups are a little complicated and cumbersome. There are a lot of pages to go through. I know there's ITXA, a new product that came out that should help with that but maybe they can use some of that knowledge from ITXA and put it into the existing BDBI setup.

Maybe also the navigation part could be a little easier, when trying to track documents.

I think it's very stable. I don't really have a lot of issues.

We're currently moving into a clustered environment so we're going to add to the scalability using two different servers and they're going to be in an active - active mode.

I have used the technical support a number of times. We've always had a good relationship as far as opening tickets is concerned. I think sometimes it's hard to navigate the website for the knowledge base and finding information or documentation is a little bit tough but usually when we call we get a good answer.

Wwe were a Gentran shop before and all our maps were in Gentran so it was a natural progression to go to BDBI so we didn't have to redo our maps. We have maybe 600 different maps so we didn't want to reengineer all those in a new platform.

The setup is fairly complex. As you do more and more installs or migrations you get a little better at it each time and we usually come up with our own documentation that we customize. We go through it and we use it as a template for each install, for each version upgrade.

It is expensive. There's a lot of overhead, there's a lot of involvement to install and maintain it.

I think we did evaluate some other solutions before but they would have had to have been half the price and completely irresistible to make us switch from Sterling. I don't think we really had an intention to leave Sterling at the time.

When considering a vendor we look at the overall cost, whether the vendor company has changed hands a lot, and what their capabilities are.

I would say make sure that they really have a high volume, a number of partners and transactions to justify the cost of putting BDBI in. Maybe if they're a smaller shop or there is some other translation software they might want to go with or going on the Cloud might be another option for a smaller company. Our size is very large and we have 12 people in our BDBI team right now that support the EDI and communications.

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.

My clients utilize IBM B2B Integrator for various purposes, such as financial services, including Swift and transformation, healthcare, and large file transfers via firewall gateway. Additionally, we employ API integrations and perform XM reconfiguration for certain use cases.

This solution can be deployed in the cloud, on-premise, hybrid, multi-cluster, and hybrid environments.

IBM B2B Integrator has helped companies with, time consumption, resources, transferring files, changing the files, and mapping, conversion, and content validation.

The most valuable feature of IBM B2B Integrator is its security and flexibility.

IBM B2B Integrator could improve the business process itself, there is no resignation of duties and in terms of the console should be changed in a way that is more user-friendly.

I have been using IBM B2B Integrator for more than 12 years.

IBM B2B Integrator is a reliable solution.

The solution is scalable.

I have used the support a long time ago. My experience was poor because they ask a lot of questions which is a waste of time. If we use the support it will take a few days. However, if we escalate the support, the response can be quicker.

I have not used a similar solution to IBM B2B Integrator before.

The initial setup of IBM B2B Integrator is simple. However, for some customers it is difficult.

To implement the solution, we follow a series of steps. Initially, we conduct a gap analysis to identify any discrepancies. Then, we gather requirements from various sources and comprehend the customer's business needs, including their reasons for seeking a solution and how it will be utilized. Based on this information, we propose the most practical scenarios. Finally, we proceed with building the necessary processes and templates.

The duration required for implementing a solution varies depending on several factors, including the specific use case and the capabilities of the engineer responsible for the implementation. If the engineer is skilled and efficient, the implementation process is likely to be quicker.

We do the implementation of the solution. We use a changing number of people to do the intention based on the requirements and complexity. For example, if we are implementing the solution in a bank, corporate will be sending a payroll file and they should be validating file content. There are two parts involved and therefore two engineers are involved.

We have seen an ROI by using IBM B2B Integrator.

The price of IBM B2B Integrator is too high. However, IBM may be willing to give a discount if there are negotiations. If they see that there is a good opportunity for them they can provide a discount.

Maintaining the solution is not a challenging task, provided that the person responsible for it possesses a thorough understanding of the operating system, such as Windows, Linux, AIX, database, and application. Therefore, the level of difficulty or ease in maintaining the solution depends on the capabilities and expertise of the maintainer or support personnel. 

There are instances where an individual may work with a solution for ten years without acquiring much knowledge beyond basic login and logout procedures. In contrast, someone else may work for only a year and acquire a comprehensive understanding of all the intelligent features within the solution. Therefore, the level of expertise is not necessarily dependent on the duration of work experience, but rather on the individual's ability and willingness to learn.

My clients use this solution because it is from IBM and of its strong partnership compliance standards, such as AS2. Additionally, IBM works with other vendors to ensure that the solution's functionality and compliance are kept up-to-date. This is a value-added service that other solution vendors do not offer.

My advice to others is they should undergo some training before using the solution.

I rate IBM B2B Integrator a nine out of ten.