Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

We needed to replace a legacy payments system with a more advanced cloud-based payments hub. Due to contract requirements, we had less than 90 days to launch a brand new product. 

Our payment hub facilitates millions of dollars of payments in the B2B space. Vinyl allowed us to launch in the cloud in less than 60 days. The solution allows us to provide payment services to banks and corporations utilizing a single sign-on to manage vendors, payment files, and customers, all in a highly secure cloud-based database.

The solution needed to be able to support mass deployment to hundreds of companies with virtually no installation or training. With this goal, the product had to be very easy to use and very intuitive. So the User Interface was key.

We also had to meet the data security requirements of the banking world. Vinyl allowed us to launch in an AWS S3 environment and utilize all of Amazon's security features.

Vinyl has been a game changer in how we can now quickly deploy key features and new products. We no longer need five or more programmers taking months to complete a task. We can now say "we move at the speed of now" thanks to Zudy Vinyl. Our customers are impressed with how quickly we can make custom changes or customer-specific feature requests in days, not months.

Our employees love Vinyl as it is easy to use, and they see how our customers react with quick turnaround on feature sets.

The ability to connect easily to third-party APIs is critical in our business and is seamless in the Vinyl application. We are constantly adding new features by utilizing 3rd party providers, and Vinyl gives us a platform to easily make these connections. 

We also find making user interface changes based on customer feedback, and we can do these within a one-week turnaround. 

The biggest feature is that the support team is assigned to us. They really stand out. They understand our business in great detail, make recommendations, and helped build a great solution.

At this point, we have not found any limitations with Vinyl. They seem to stay one step ahead by coming out with new features regularly. These features are typically more technical in nature.

When designing the user interface, there are many built-in features; however, Vinyl could use some more extensive design elements that are used in marketing, such as Canva or Web design tools. These would allow for more extensive design elements to be added more easily. 

As one can expect, no one can know your business better than yourself, so testing and QA are crucial to success. Anything they can do to assist in this area would be a plus.

I've used the solution for six to nine months.

In the past six months, Vinyl has had 100% uptime. This product is used 24/7/365.

The scalability of this product seems to be limitless. One of our product requirements was to be able to mass enable hundreds of banks who, in turn, offer our solution to thousands of customers.

With limited engineering at our firm, we rely heavily on Zudy's team to help out when issues arise. 99% of the time, the issues are internal to us and not Zudy. However, they still are always willing to help until the problem is resolved. We could not ask for a better-assigned team of professionals.

Positive

We had an older product that was built in-house and was no longer flexible enough to keep up with the market requirements. We needed to upgrade our solution; the only way to do that was to start from scratch. We also need to have something live in 90 days which is unheard of.

Due to time constraints, we utilized Zudy's internal development team to provide the base setup, application details, and launch at AWS. It was extremely straightforward.

We utilized the Zudy Vinyl implementation team. We were assigned an application design engineer and two programmers. Their level of expertise was superior, and their attitude was perfect. We treated them as part of our own internal team.

Our ROI on the first release of Vinyl was visible in less than 60 days.

The licensing is very competitive and is based on a yearly fixed number. We wanted to be on a quarterly payment, and they made that happen. It is a very flexible organization.

We evaluated numerous alternatives, including Google, Microsoft, Caspio, and Quickbase. We chose Vinyl for several reasons, including the willingness to provide an application-specific demo. It had great pricing, and the sales and engineering team was there on day one.

Vinyl has been a game changer for our company and our customers. Having started over three tech firms in my career, I wish Vinyl was around a decade ago; we would have launched many more products.

We use VINYL to develop a mobile app for dog owners. This is not an enterprise app. It's a B2C model, and the app is marketed for public use.  The goal is to create a resource for dog owners that enables them to live their best lives with their dogs.  It offers health record storage, a live map of pet-friendly businesses, and a mobile marketplace where consumers can shop for dog products.  

We have integrated the app with our database of current PooPrints customers which will transfer their data from our internal database to the mobile dog app.  

VINYL has sped up the app development process, enabling us to release a public version of the app much quicker than we would expect from other app developers. Communication with the app team has also been excellent.

As mentioned above, we are not using VINYL as an enterprise app for our associates. The app itself has not greatly improved our operations in ways that it might for other VINYL users.  However, we are excited about VINYL's potential to help organize and analyze our dog ownership data and general Mobile Dog user data under the admin portion of the application.

The ZPM system enables us to organize projects and monitor their progress.  The ease of logging into the VINYL app to test new features makes testing smoother, and we feel more involved in the creation of the app and its functions at every step of the way.  

The data tracking and analysis capabilities within the admin portion of the app are also exciting. We are eager to begin using these features once our marketing campaigns begin in order to track user downloads, interactions, etc. 

Some aspects of VINYL are limiting from a B2C standpoint. For example, it would be nice to have more flexibility with what the VINYL parameters allow us to develop within the app.  It is difficult to think of an example off the top of my head, but there have been times when we couldn't develop something a particular way because VINYL didn't support it.  However, the team Zudy assigned to us has been great about adjusting and finding ways around these hurdles.

We have used VINYL for around eight months.

VINYL has been highly stable so far.  We haven't had any issues. 

I am slightly concerned about the scalability of our B2C app as we add users and update the app to include more features. Flexibility with our offering and integration with other companies' solutions will be vital. 

The Zudy app team assigned us has been helpful and responsive to concerns I have brought up.  Through email and ZPM, we can easily communicate issues and have received solutions in a timely manner. 

Positive

VINYL is a new product, so we had nothing before it.  We use another developer company for our World Pet Registry database, but we aren't using them for this project because our experience with them has been rocky at times.  

The initial setup was extremely simple. It may be different for enterprise app customers, but the setup was no big deal for us.  Our mobile dog product team received our log-in credentials, and we were good to go.

We deployed VINYL in-house.

We cannot calculate a return on investment now because we haven't started charging our users or promoting the app in general. 

Payment processing has changed since Jitterbit acquired Zudy.  We previously cut checks, but we are no longer allowed.  This has made paying for the service more complicated, but the issue is being resolved.  Overall, the pricing model has been simple, and we understand each cost.

We did look into some other options but decided to go with Zudy because of its development speed and proof of concept offering.

I rate Zudy VINYL eight out of 10. 

We are using it for workflow management and transportation.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and rapid development. We need to be able to find stuff quickly and produce solutions to our users. We are a quickly changing, rapidly integrating company. Therefore, this solution allows us to keep pushing forward and ensures our continuous improvement.

On the development side, we would like to see continued improvement on the visibility of the subqueries, as we are building applications. E.g., I would like to have more visualization in the back-end of the data objects and how they are interrelated.

The interface has had a lot of changes to it. It is better than it was before. However, with the subqueries in particular, this has been the most difficult part of the interface.

I would like them to build out more tools for communication, particularly the ability to do a multinode panel via email.

We have had no performance issues with it.

It is very scalable from its licensing to design. We have not had any performance issues when scaling.

I do think we may need to consider using a different server, but I don't think that is anything against Zudy.

We have not had to use their technical support. 

We have spoken with their consultants and developers though, who have been responsive and know what they are doing. Early on, we requested things to be added to the firmware, and it was added in a week or two.

They have some online training material. They have courses that they do in person. They also make stuff available online. I have had some white papers provided to me by the consultants, which were understandable and clear.

It mostly replaced Excel, Access, and emails. Access 365 was not doing as much as it had in previous versions.

Our CEO had a relationship with someone at Zudy, so we tested the product and saw it as an early opportunity. It fit with our requirements and we were trying to move on from Microsoft Access.

The initial setup was straightforward. The data connections simply pull in data, and it took five minutes to start building an app.

It's easy to understand the basics and learn from other examples. However, it takes a bit of experience to know everything that it's capable of doing.

It was a slow roll out. VINYL was the cause of it.

We have probably been using it in production for a year, but have had no issues in product. 

We have seen a 30 percent decrease in time for some of our workflows.

As far as connectivity and ease of use, nobody else was doing anything better.

Our company works with medical devices. We sell and service imaging equipment to hospitals and clinics in the territories we serve. NXC's primary use case for Zudy VINYL was to provide a mobile field service management application that our current ERP provider could not provide to us.

VINYL has improved the way that our company functions. Primarily, the first impact was user satisfaction. The majority of our employees at NXC imaging are not in the office. They're out in the field covering the territories that we serve so prior to VINYL, they had to log in or they had to find Wi-Fi, then log into a VPN. Then they had to connect to a terminal server. Then they had to open up Microsoft Dynamics AX and then navigate to their schedule. What VINYL has given us is the ability to serve up all of that information on their phone, so now they're free to do their jobs. They're pretty happy.

VINYL has given us the ability to really improve the speed with which we deploy releases and respond to the good ideas that our people have.

Another thing that this application has allowed us to do is to bring value to the business very quickly. The benefits or the impact on the IT organization is a big morale builder or booster for us. The real benefit is that our IT organization now has the confidence to say yes to requests as opposed to no or have significant delays. The team is motivated to field requests, work on improvements and rollout changes. It's very easy to roll out a change. It takes a couple of minutes depending on the app that we're we're talking about. It's pretty easy to keep my team going in the right direction.

Prior to VINYL, we were working within a Tier 2 application that took a very long time for us to change. It's very, very expensive. Our burn rate for making changes in VINYL is about a tenth of what it was in the other platform and we can do it in a tenth of the time.

Comparing where we've been to where we are now in terms of the technical platform, it's incredibly easy to make changes, and it's incredibly easy to approve. From being able to deliver value to their business from a user perspective, it's really cool as an IT leader to be able to say yes to requests and deliver them in a timely fashion, as opposed to saying no, or coming up with reasons to delay or to give them a long term "it depends" answer.

The most valuable features of Zudy VINYL are the abilities for us to rapidly develop applications, deploy them easily, and then make adjustments as we realize the things that we forgot to put in the first release or the second release. We've done eight releases in eleven months for our field management solution.

The features that I'd like to see in VINYL next would be the ability to have more control over or have a rule-based control over column headings and column labels. Depending on what we're trying to display to a user, we can put in rules to change things around, make it easier for that.

The other thing would be a more sophisticated workflow engine. I'm an ex-Nintex user, and having a more graphical user interface to be able to build complex workflows would be really good.

The stability of VINYL is pretty amazing. It just works.

The scalability of VINYL is what I'm counting on. The licensing model is amazing for us, to be able to do as many apps as we can for the cost that we're paying and not have to worry about the per-user cost going up. We are planning on replacing our entire ERP platform with VINYL apps, building the things that we need that we can't buy off the shelf.

The tech support at Zudy is top notch. They are a bunch of talented people who are very responsive and we've not had any significant business interruption since going live with our first app last year.

I knew that we had to make a change in our ERP platform. I was brought in to NXC Imaging to evaluate what was going on with their ERP solution. They were having all kinds of issues with their Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. It took me about two months to understand what had happened, and I immediately recognized that we needed to go down a different path.

We needed to change our strategy of staying with a Tier 1 or Tier 2 platform. What we do is unique and there isn't software that we can buy. I knew that we needed to invest in a no- code, or low-code application development platform that would give us rapid development capabilities. I've had experience with other platforms in the past, so it was a pretty easy decision for me to go after getting board approval to make this happen.

Installing and getting Zudy up and running was very easy from an infrastructure point of view. What was unique about us is that we were their first Dynamics AX integration. They had not done AX before, so it took them about three days to figure out the business connectors and the data model, and from there we were rolling.

The team that we used, and are using, to build our apps is Zudy. They've been a great group to work with; very talented, very flexible, very responsive, and they're just a good group of guys.

VINYL has affected our user productivity in many ways. The most measurable is the amount of time that our field engineers were spending feeding our old ERP system data. I can guess that every FE, and we've got more than fifty in our company, has got an extra hour of their day back not having to deal with the connectivity and all the different transactions that they're doing. The ability to interface with the apps on their phone has made their lives significantly better.

Another thing from an IT perspective, what VINYL has given us is the ability to reestablish confidence in our user base. Our people recognize the difference in VINYL versus before VINYL, and they really, really like the VINYL experience better than anything else they've had in the past.

The VINYL platform with the Zudy development team has allowed us to be significantly more responsive to the business as they come up with ideas or we needed to make process changes. Business process changes are evolving all the time, new markets, new technologies. I would say that the speed of the improvement in iterations is tenfold. We can do things 10 times faster in VINYL than we could in Dynamics AX at a tenth of the cost. Fixes that would take our old service provider weeks and months to do, can take five minutes.

The value for us with VINYL is that we've got one fee that we're paying per year and we can deploy and build as many apps and bring in as many users as we need. It's a big change from the Microsoft Dynamics AX model, where we have per-user fees, and in order for us to provide or to get access for our users, internal or external, it's a per-user fee. The value proposition is incredible. What they're giving us for functionality and the ability to do the things that we need to do, they're exceeding my expectations.

Our decision criteria were really based on opportunity and timelines, so I didn't have a lot of other people on our shortlist. OutSystems was one that I had had experience within the past, but their platform didn't really fit what we needed to do. I had some relationships with some folks at Zudy and the speed of trust happened; it didn't take us very long.

We were at the TechEd last year as a prospect. It was about a month after that we signed up, and eleven weeks later they delivered a proof of concept that our current ERP solution provider couldn't do in three years.

If I knew of anybody that was out considering an investment in a low-code or a no-code development platform, I would encourage them to call me and let's have a conversation about how VINYL has changed my ability to lead at IT and it's changed NXC Imaging's ability to run their business.

On a scale from one to ten, I think Zudy VINYL is a nine. It's not quite a ten because it doesn't do everything and it can't write itself, but we've been able to do more things in the last eleven months to make our company run better than previous organizations and teams and applications did in the previous four years.

We started out doing prototyping and moved that to a demonstration application. Now, we are moving into a trial version that we hope will convert over into our running application.

It works well online and on my mobile. It is storing data in our Cloud Datastore, as well as theirs.

We are on the most current VINYL release.

We are a startup, and this product will not be for internal consumption. This is going to be a product for sale that we're building. It solves an industry problem today where there is no management of data, and it's just spreadsheets emailed around. So far, people in the industry who have seen what we are doing like what they see.

The team is its most valuable feature. The people I work with are great. They can get the stuff done that I want done usually faster than I expect.

The product is super fast at getting things done. 

I had expected a portal that can be secure and handle data ingestion and visualization. It hits all those points and that is what it's doing.

There are some acknowledged technical limitations. I was looking to do some metadata manipulation, which is very atypical. Zudy said that they will work on building me a workaround. If there is a weakness, that would be it. However, they seem to acknowledge it and are finding a workaround for me. While it may not be in VINYL, they are doing an external program to shore up the weakness.

We started using it the week before Thanksgiving 2019. So, we have been using it for about four months.

I have been given concrete examples of how the solution scales, but I'm not really worried about it right now.

We don't have any users at the moment. We have people preparing to become trial users.

I have never had to grab technical support outside of the developers

I did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They keep me aware of anything complex, but I do not have to expend any energy to deal with it.

They got a good demonstration application done for me in two months. This allowed me to get funding so I could survive as a business. The application was good enough to get customers interested. I like to say, "I would be working at Walmart if they hadn't been successful."

Today, everything is in the Zudy space. We will then migrate it over into our cloud space, which they are capable of doing. We will keep them as our prototype vendor; whenever we are working on new things, they will do that for us. Some of the actual running systems, we will probably keep it on VINYL until we run into something that we can't do.

I'm not doing the programming (or no-coding), but I'm managing the features with their architects. All the development is being done by the Zudy team. I am working on getting some developers who can augment that team, but we haven't added that yet.

I have seen ROI. The biggest benefits are:

• The speed
• The team's ability to budget
• The team's ability to stay within budget and get things done.
• We are able to experiment, and usually you can't afford to experiment much.

Compared to if I used traditional methods, such as hiring developers and setting up systems, VINYL is costing me less than half of what it would normally cost.

I did look at all of the rapid development options, like Zoho. I liked my interface with the business team at Zudy well enough that I didn't look at anybody else because they seem to know what they are doing.

This is a platform which should be considered seriously for rapid prototyping. If you want to build it yourself, at least use them to do the early testing. I would also recommend to consider them for your long-term production platform use. For data management and data visualization, this product is hard to beat. Feature-wise, I haven't run into anything that we just can't do. It accesses our external systems and processes, using them very well.

For what they have given me, the product is a 10 (out of 10).

I use it for business process automation across a variety of areas. I am in charge of commercial IT and we have used this technology to enhance some of the commercial business processes.

In my current organization, we are using it in account planning, incentive compensation, field communications via SMS alerts, and onboarding of employees.

The ability to build apps quickly by connecting to almost any data source, while having workflow and routing, really give you the ability to enhance more static systems and drive value to the business.

• Ability to connect to disparate data sources
• The workflow engine
• Speed and agility in building apps

Perhaps the UI could be improved.

There have been no stability issues. It is a very stable platform.

No issues with scalability.

The support team always makes itself available and drives resolutions quicker than we can typically keep up. It is really excellent.

Their services are excellent. They typically provide a team of resources to get the environment set up and help build your first app.

Pricing is less than the cost of a consultant and the value you receive is much greater.

We looked at other middleware products but liked the unique capabilities of this one.

Try it. Sometimes, the use cases are not evident. Start slow and pilot it and the value becomes evident.

We use VINYL when none of our other systems solves the business need that's being asked for. We've used it for a lot of different things. We've got an event management application, we have a compliance tracker, previously we used it for a work-request application. We use it for custom-reporting, and we've also been using it as a way to bring together a couple different systems which we call our "Customer 360," where we can go and get an idea of a customer and all their related entities.

Since we're still primarily on an AS/400-based system, any client-facing output has some limitations using output from that system. What has been a great process-improvement and improvement in business communications - giving us really good client-facing communication - is having our Zudy applications take information from our AS/400, consume that information, and make it look nice. It turns it into something that we're happy to send out to our customers, something that's a lot more contemporary. It enables us to use a little bit more graphic design and it looks new and fresh.

One of the troubles we have sometimes is the amount of data we're processing within the applications. That can really add a lot of "laggy-ness." That's an ongoing struggle we're going to have while we use it. It doesn't happen for all our applications, only some of them that are heavy on the reporting. 

And where we can get a more contemporary client-facing output and PDF version, it's still somewhat limited as to what we can do with those templates.

We don't really have any crashes, so that's always good. You can get an error if you're trying to do too much at once, before the system can catch up. That's understandable. 

If we do find anything that turns out to be a real error, it's super-quick to go in and figure out what the error is. You make a pretty simple change to correct it. The different layers within the platform for each application are pretty linear. You've got the same three layers: the cosmetic layer, the business-rules, and your data layer. It's always going to be somewhere in one of those layers that you find the issue or figure out where you need to make a change. You're not having to really go anywhere else to do that. It's pretty centralized.

The greater the amount of data we're trying to use, the more bogged down the applications will get. It does reach a point where it's very noticeable how slow the application is moving because of the amount of data it's trying to use.

For example, sometimes it can be five minutes to refresh an application that's only producing some 75 PDFs. That seems a little slow. We've got another application that's producing about 230 reports - they're all pretty similar - and that can take upwards of ten to 15 minutes to process. One of the reports we have to access, it's our own fault that it takes so long to process because we've got so many data fields that we're aggregating together. But in general, the more data you're working with the slower it goes.

We haven't really needed tech support. Because the maintenance is so small, when something goes wrong we've got our contracted developers who usually jump on it right away. They can find and fix the problem that same day.

I wasn't part of the initial setup so I'm not sure what steps it took to get there but I think the complexity of the setup depends on what you're using it for. We've got a lot of different data sources coming together from a lot of places, so I imagine that getting that all together was a notable effort. We definitely had to work through permissions, allowing access on our server, allowing access on their server. There is a good amount of setup. I don't know how long it took.

It was us with Zudy handling implementation of the platform.

Definitely make sure that internal staff learn how applications are built. Zudy does provide free training and I highly recommend it so that you can bring all development back in-house, be a little bit more self-sufficient with it and not reliant on Zudy. From the very beginning, learn the platform as much as possible and learn from Zudy developers that you work with.

The entire time we've had VINYL, we've had Zudy developers contracted to our company, so it's actually Zudy employees who have been doing the development. I've never actually built one of our own solutions but I did attend a Zudy training session to learn how to build solutions. Our applications are so much more advanced than what we covered in the training but I can see how it all fits together. It's like breaking apart coding and development into an ultra-configuration tool.

I wouldn't say that it's relatively simple. You do have to have a developer mindset about bringing all the pieces together. I wouldn't say someone brand new could be given this tool and build an application. You do have to have some understanding of how the different layers in the VINYL platform work together. And even then, there are just so many more advanced features that you can use that really get into how we're using it. As far as anything really basic goes, even then you would need some level of training to be able to use the tool.

In terms of how many users are currently using VINYL in our organization, most of our applications have been targeted to very niche users. Originally, it probably wasn't more than 50 or so, but we've been working on soft-releases and rollout of one of our other applications for that "Customer 360" view and, eventually, the entire company will have access to that. We have close to 400 employees.

We're an insurance company so the roles of the VINYL users are anything and everything. For our event management, there's an underwriting tool and that's used in agency relations. We've got another tool used by underwriting. That department has been the primary user. We've got an application that simplifies calculations of insurance premiums for very very specific policy types. Our underwriting compliance team use it to track their filings. We have a deductible-billing application, which is one of the ones that is consuming information and putting it into a new, modern output. That's used by our finance department. There's another agency relations application we use that tracks progress of our top agents and it tracks extra commission that we can provide to those agents. And the "Customer 360" can be used by any department, mainly our underwriting and claims departments. It really is flexible.

Maintenance is very minimal. With our live production applications, they just don't break, which is great. We love that. There's zero-to-little maintenance required.

We've got quite a few applications in production now and we've got more in development. There are a few more on the list to go into development. We've still got a sizable backlog to work through.

Overall I would rate it a seven out of ten. I love how customizable it is, how easy it is, how fast it can be. The downside is that scalability and the troubles dealing with large data sets.

The primary use case for us is creating applications for business and manufacturing productivity.  We are a small to mid-size manufacturing company, and there are lots of processes and data collection that is made much easier with Vinyl apps.  

For example, we have an app that allows our quality team to run QC audits on our product and enter the results against targeted measurements. We now have a database of quality audits and can run actionable reports based on this data.  

When a quality team member has a suggestion for the app, there always seems to be a way in Vinyl to deliver the feature request.

We can take basically any manual data entry process that exists in the organization and replace it with a much easier-to-use Vinyl app.  

The data collection and reporting are much more robust than team-shared spreadsheets. Raw material receiving, quality auditing, and equipment utilization are all examples of processes greatly improved by Vinyl apps. We can even integrate with our ERP system by APIs and replace clunky ERP interfaces with much better Vinyl interfaces.  

I get constant feedback from users that it has made their life easier to use the Vinyl apps instead of the previous tool they used.

App development, database storage, and 3rd party app integrations are great. The low-code development makes data storage easy, and web-based apps are very customizable. The platform can connect to many third-party data sources.  

The training resources are also robust and allow for complete online training.  We have set up development, QA, and production environments to isolate our different processes safely.  

Vinyl makes it easy to push changes between the environments. So many out-of-the-box features work well with Vinyl. However, Zudy has also worked closely with us to create plugins and other features that meet our exact needs.

I don't have much to say about improvements. I am relatively new when it comes to the development of apps in Vinyl. I sometimes find formatting tricky to get the front end of an app the way I want it. That could be improved by a more intuitive use of themes.  

Overall, Vinyl does a very good job at what it is meant to do - low code development of apps. It helps to have a background in SQL. It is not necessary, however, as Vinyl shows you all the underlying data to the app under development. It has become an invaluable tool for our organization.

I have been using the solution for about six months, however, the company has been using it for longer.