IBM B2B Integrator Reviews

One of the most valuable aspects of this solution is that it's a "consolidated" suite of communication protocols, offerings, data transformation and back-end application integration. It allows me to implement one solution, communicate with external and internal trading partners and transfer data between network systems using just one solution rather than many different solutions.

It allows us to scale quicker to what a customer needs. A lot of your available time is reduced because it's efficient.

It's a very good solution, but there's also room for improvement to make it easier and a little more user friendly. It's still more of a toolbox in a way. It's got a lot of components that you have to configure, which is great because it gives you extreme flexibility, but that also adds a level of complexity to it.

We could use templates and some shortcuts that would help users get up and running quicker and give them confidence in the solution.

Visibility and reporting is lacking. There are some default reporting capabilities such that we wouldn't have to build, for example, error reports, or bundling up. It should be more user friendly.

Also some pre-built, typical B2B business processes would be good, instead of having to build them out; I'd rather have some templates that we could use and modify.

It is mostly stable, depending on certain factors as there are a lot of different components. Some platforms are stable; all in all, I don't see any recent issues with stability.

Scalability is very good. It scales well vertically and horizontally also.

If you use the technical support, it's good for specific front-end issues. It's more of a challenge if you're trying to ask the "how to" questions, then it's not as good. For instance, "I am having this problem and this is the error"; here they can help find what the cause of that error is and related issues. But regarding the "how to" stuff, then they need to be better.

We upgraded because of limited capabilities in an earlier solution which didn't keep up with the set of standards, such as the newer versions of EDI, X12 standards, that are available in the Sterling product.

We realized the necessity for separate components, like for communications software versus back-end translation software or evaluating solutions and hardware without buying multiple products to put together.

The initial setup is both straightforward and complex. The newer versions have an installation manager which helps. Depending on the way you deploy it, you have to know cluster versus single instances or nuances which may be a challenge.

We looked at Axway and GXS and considered some of the transformations from some of the other vendors, transfer solutions, the tightness of the solution, the maturity of the solution.

When considering potential vendors we look at quality and the level of customers they do business with. We look at their success stories in the industry that I may be interested in. We ask questions like, "Have they done this before?", and "Do they know my industry and the companies that I know?"

We did some proofs of concept. We had certain scenarios, mapping translation scenarios, communication information-type scenarios that we ran through with each of the products to see how well they could handle it. Obviously, the outcome of those comparisons also influenced our recent choice.

IBM's mapping tool for translation is easier to use and intuitive, and it's been around a long time. Some of the other vendors are a little bit narrowly focused and maybe didn't have the scalability of the IBM product.

Try to reach out in the network of users via LinkedIn, or at an IBM conference. Get the feedback from other clients that use the solution and see if it's a fit, and what challenges it can meet for them.

We're in the UAE. Out of the top 10 banks, there are around six or seven banks that are actually using the product as an SOA layer. As integration with that, they have a different core banking system. They have different layers. They have a B2B also and they have a partner ecosystem. 

Clients are using the solution for the legacy applications, they are using it for microservices that are designed for the various different use cases. There's card management based on that, for example. Every customer has a different requirement and different use cases.

Currently, I'm working with one customer in government where they're trying to build that complete enterprise integration layer, which will have an ESB that is going to connect to that and all their internal applications. They have multiple CRM ERB finance modules.

Afterward, they are exporting the API to external companies, including government entities through the APIs we are exposing, in order to exchange the data. 

There are multiple stakeholders, typically.

The IoT IBM has on offer is very good. There are event streams. These collect data from IoT devices and analyze the data in real-time. IBM has a partnership with that Kafka. They use Kafka for real-time event data collection.

They have an infra layer and a platform layer as well as a software and application layer and an integration layer. They have a big data portfolio. It's great for Kafka and that Hadoop, all the data streaming, data normalization, all those tools are on hand for data quality.

It's easy to collect, diagnose, and transform, and to do real-time analytics through that. We have a complete portfolio from IBM called IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. It's in a bunch of products.

Product-wise, the product portfolio it's a very good product. We have the data power that is the gateway security and it's a very good product. 

The stability is very good.

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The technical support on offer through the portal is very helpful and responsive.

The current trend is to have data integration, hybrid cloud integration, and microservices with further API monetization. The solution needs to ensure that it has all these capabilities in order to properly satisfy a customer's needs. 

The solution definitely needs that gateway security, where all messages need to be secured, from the security point of view. 

They do not have a solid partner ecosystem, and they do not have a clear roadmap for down the line; they're missing that clear roadmap.

They do not have proper documentation of legal requirements so that a partner or a customer can quickly learn and get familiar with it. IBM needs to do a better job of supplying these details.

I've been using the solution for 15 years or so. It's been well over a decade. It's been a while at this point.

It's a very tested and proven solution. If you're talking about that product portfolio-wise, product-wise, it's quite reliable. We can see in the Gartner Quadrant Table that IBM is always well-positioned. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability of the product is excellent. If a company needs to build the solution out, they can do so.

There are thousands of organizations that are using the product worldwide. If I'm talking about the UAE, our market, in the UAE we have close to 72 customers who are using this product.

IBM offers PMR support. Customers can log into the IBM portal and they can create that PMR, and the IBM team, based on the complexity, can respond as appropriate. If there is a severe case, IBM can typically respond within 30 minutes to one hour. They are quite knowledgeable and very responsive.

I didn't use any other solution previously. Predominantly I was into IBM; I was working within IBM itself. When I left IBM, I joined a company that was also selling IBM software only. We have a DNSR contract. If a customer is asking for any specific region, then we can ping another vendor, however, we don't sell the other vendor's solution.

Usually, when I work with the customer, they come up from a tender RFP, where they have a complex requirement. They have a lot of legacy applications, and they have a different kind of hybrid cloud. They may be working with a Salesforce cloud and on-premises applications. It's not really straightforward. Typically, they are big enterprises with complex environments. It's rarely straightforward. 

We have our own consultancy team and we have a services delivery team within the company. They typically handle the deployment, however, sometimes, if we do not have the bandwidth or our own legal resources, we rely on a partner ecosystem where we have to engage with our partners to implement the solution.

There are multiple kinds of offerings. If the customer is going to deploy on-premises, we have a perpetual license. If the customer is going to use the solution like a software as a service cloud solution, it's a monthly subscription. It's all according to the customer requirement and the customer budget.

We don't use it for ourselves. I am part of the sales team. I used to sell this product to my customers. The customers use on-premises as well as cloud deployment models. 

The market has gone through a bit of a digital transformation. Customers need that integration layer that provides the capability to integrate with the various kinds of applications, and a solution should be able to integrate with the hybrid cloud. That is one of the major modern requirements.

A customer today will often have devices on-premises and often have a multi-cloud. A product should have the capability to have that integration supported by the hybrid cloud, and at the same time have the data integration layer with the capability for IoT sensors.

Whoever is trying to choose a tool needs to look for the integration to deploy to their enterprise. They have to look at all the aspects, and then they should select that tool that is going to be fit for their current requirements as well as their future needs.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

It is easy of use and it's easy to maintain. It's also faster to on-board partners.

It has ended invisibility, which is not there any more. That's a big implement for any solution.

There are a couple of issues which could be improved. One is the outcome of the ITXA integration on installation. We need better visibility around code lists. There is the handling of code lists and API calls to support partial update of any interfaces, training partner management, all of which is not there today. Their integration with ICCs is only limited to ADI, but it should be open for other formats.

Also, there should be a single place to do things, rather than making it complicated, not moving away and truncating the old features but instead coming up with the new and still keeping the old stuff confuses people sometimes. I think that's pretty much what I would like to say.

I have used the solution for the past 15 years.

Stability is still not where it's supposed to be. There is always a challenge when we upgrade things and improve on new versions.

Scalability is great.

For my company, I would say the technical support is about 9/10. The only hesitation I have is the inability for IBM to understand the customer's need, and improve their product. Our requests were not responded to in a timely manner and the announcement was not done the way ABC would have benefited from it. But the majority of our concerns were addressed on time.

We were already an IBM shop but not to the newest technologies. So we ran into the situation where our systems were not as scalable. We didn't have end to end visibility, which became a key part of our business functions because we need to get into all the solutions.

We wanted to make sure that we have a single integrated application, which can fulfill the need of all the backend applications. Looking at the current solution to improve that was costlier. So we decided to go with an out-of-the-box solution from IBM, and that's where we are.

The complete setup is always complex. Any new setup you do is not always straightforward, it takes months. So there are two aspects to consider here. One is the installation part and one is configuration to make it work.

Installation was simple and straightforward. But the configuration to tune the system to make it function the way it was intended to, wasn't known up-front. For instance with regard to clustering issues we ran into when we were in production. If we would have known that up-front, it would have saved us time and energy in the chaotic situation we were in. Those sort of challenges could have been improved if we had known it up-front.

There were a couple of criteria when selecting a vendor. We had four big players. We did compare, we had a demo on-site. We did POCs and RFCs. After four weeks of exercise, we selected IBM.

The key challenge is that the Sterling Integrator has been there in this industry for more than two decades. There are key loopholes, or I would say there are low-hanging issues with the Sterling Integrator, and they could have all been improved.

Unparalleled, they try to invest energy to integrate with other applications of IBM products. The key essential part of what you are doing should be focused and unparalleled. I know it takes time. There are a lot of other fears being raised by lots of customers.

I have been a user for Sterling Integrator for the last 15 years. So it's not the first one for me and I see the same problems as all the clients. If those would improve, this would become best of breed.

There are also other challenges on the visibilities. Right now there are at least 10 to 15 players in the market, which build solutions using Sterling Integrator as a backbone. So why not IBM? If we have that as a single source of truth, we can install it in-house.

Whatever industry or company, it doesn't matter. Depending on their need, Sterling Integrator is still a big framework for anyone who is looking to integrate their backend applications which are in legacy mode today, and their point to point applications. If they really want to have this type of application, well it's scalable and Sterling Integrator is still the solution.

I have been a speaker here for Sterling Integrator, and I think IBM already has at least four or five prospects here. They're talking to me to understand how we did at ABC. So I'm helping them to get to us.

It's one of the super solutions today.

From the scalability standpoint, not having to do upgrades is a valuable feature. It does provide that cloud-based offering for us, so that we don't need to support the back-end hardware.

It has helped improve the speed of delivery. Like I mentioned earlier, as far as not having to worry about scaling out, as we grow more trading or have more partners that come in, when we have to set up EDI with these folks. Now, we don't have to worry about issues such as if our environment is large enough or do we have to add or need to grow space and such things.

From my perspective and as per what I know, it needs more hardening of the environment and they need to make sure that there is less unscheduled downtime. 

It does solve our issues and problems. However, the main issue is around uptime and they should do as much as they can, so as to correct anything in regards to that.

The stability is good. We have experienced some issues with unexpected downtime from IBM Sterling. So for the most part it is good, but we have seen interruptions.

The scalability of this solution is really good.

Previously, we were using Gentran. They chose to take it out from being an on-site/on-prem solution to the cloud. So, for those very reasons that I have mentioned earlier, i.e., as far as not having to worry about the configuration, setup and management, are the main reasons as to why we switched to this solution.

The support, stability and being able to provide the proper solution are the key criteria while selecting a vendor.

Probably you just need to make sure, as you go through your contract, that your SLAs are accounted properly and you know what to expect with any potential downtime.

It is the best for the business. How the business gets all the files for whatever transfers we do and getting it securely is one of the biggest benefits of this product.

It makes money for the bank and then this makes it easy for our customers, i.e., the bank's customers, to send or receive data in a secure manner.

A more deeper monitoring system for the product itself is required. Right now, we do use the IBM Control Center for monitoring, which is another IBM monitoring product, but it would be better if they can provide an easy-to-use interface for monitoring purposes.

The interface is too detailed, i.e., if you want to give it to the help desk to just monitor, it doesn't give you a yes / no option nor does it give an alert / no alert option. It just gives too much details for everything. It requires too much customization that we need to do, so as to make the product work to its best.

It is a pretty good product but still a lot of customization is required for each and everything that we do. It gives you a lot of flexibility for a new IT person. However, he has to learn a lot of different ways; it's not just in one way you can configure the product, i.e., the way most of the Microsoft products or any other products would be. That's the only way you can do it. IBM does give you the option to customize in a lot of different ways, which is good, but for new people getting in there, it involves too much learning.

It's very stable, it is a good product that you can have.

The scalability is also very good; love that.

We do use the IBM support all the time. We have a support contract with them, so it is very valuable. We are always able to find the right person and the right solutions.

We were not previously using any other solutions. We are trying to move to the IBM EDI, which is the IBM Transformation Extender. It's an extra IBM ITX product that is what we are trying to use, because that's the bank's requirement/business requirement.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

I would definitely recommend this product.

Make sure that you always have the IBM support because being a big product, when getting exposed to the outside world all the time, it has a lot of vulnerabilities that come with it.

It's a great product and should go for it. It will make money for your bank.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are costs and stability.

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.

It is simple and extensible, but it's sustainable and easy to use.

It's made us a great deal more nimble, or quick, to be able to change or react to customer or vendor changes and impacting our ability to partner with them, the customer center.

You'd have to contact my technical team to get any detail on room for improvement. I think, really, the ideal is what it's capabilities are right now.

It's kind of always on and hasn't given us any grief in terms of downtime and five nines plus, and online capability.

Our ability to work with our customers and add to, extend, and broaden our footprint for B2B transaction processing really makes a big difference. And I think that technology is helping us do that.

We would rate technical support fairly high; seven or eight, nine, out of ten.

We were using a different solution, many different ones, maybe we had three or four. The idea, really, was that in order to grow and continue our ability to partner with our customers and vendors, we needed a single solution. It was really a challenge.

Initial setup was complex in that we had a lot of legacy systems, and we were setting, or moving toward, a single platform, one version. That made a big difference from the complexity point of view. It's been simplified, and worked on; the transition from our multiple legacy systems to the new IBM solution.

Plan your requirements, understand what it is you're trying to accomplish, or where you want to go, and then fit the solution to that. Don't try to figure things out first, or just build solutions.

The valuable feature is the ability to integrate across various enterprise systems. It's a very flexible tool. The way we have customized our solutions based on IBM Sterling B2B Integrator cannot be replicated by any other B2B vendor on the market right now.

One benefit is the flexibility. In our company, our bread and butter is a transportation system. We transport consumer product goods from Central America back to North America.

I would like to see the implementation of APIs into the solution mix. They are already working on this. I would like to see more capabilities to understand how easily APIs can connect and how they can be integrated with the existing B2B suite.

It is a pretty stable solution.

The only con of the scalability is that we are trying to see how we can scale to the cloud. It is not really clear at this point how this will occur with this solution. We don’t know how it will scale if we move to a hybrid, on-premise solution on the cloud. That's not really clear at this point. I am trying to learn precisely that.

I was not around when they chose the solution. At that point, I believe this was the best middle-of-the-road solution in the 2008-09 timeframe.

I was not part of the initial setup, but I was there during two subsequent upgrades of this solution. It is not something you actually plug and play. It's very complex and it actually requires a technical consultant. It's not something which is very easy.

The solution is very good for the traditional integration scenarios, such as point-to-point integrations. When you're looking to take the technology to the cutting edge, new age, digital, 21st-century, omni-channel kind of scenario, it still doesn’t make the cut.

When selecting a vendor, the most important factor is obviously the company size. This plays a role in the market. We go by the Gartner market leader recommendation. Anything on Gartner gets our "eyeballs."