SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

We're primarily using it for communication and translation of our traditional EDI documents. We're an automotive supplier so a big part of our business is automotive related, but we're also using it for synchronous APIs or web services with some of our customers or trading partners.

Of course, not everything we're doing is EDI. We're doing a lot of distribution of unstructured files, even in our company, transactions between systems. With the mapper, we're doing data transformation as well, to integrate back to our back-end ERP system. We're also using the Message Tracking component, which allows us to confirm what's come in and what has processed.

About 90 percent of our global EDI transaction volume is coming in and out of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We have different application development groups within IT. My area is primarily EDI and integrations, but in some of the other areas, like HR or payroll or shipping, there's a great need to transfer files and data with their trading partners. Those partners could be a bank or an HR company or a payroll company. The folks in our other application areas don't really have any experience with communications and integrations. Where I'm able to improve our organization is that all I need to do is have them tell me, "Hey, I need to get a file or send a file to this trading partner, can you help me?" Then I'm able to work with them and get that set up and tested.

Our other application development folks don't have to spend time worrying about doing that part of the project. I'm something like a middleman and using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has decreased the turnaround time on a lot of these projects.

Also, one of the things that SEEBURGER always touts is their ability to do "any to any" formatting. I really didn't understand it when we first got the product, but what I've come to find is it doesn't matter if you want to take a CSV file or an XML file or a flat file or a PDF file or a structured EDI file; you can transform it from one format to another - any to any or even to the same format - which is a really nice feature. We deal with a lot of different databases and structures in our company. We don't have a single system. We used to have a lot of problems trying to integrate our different locations. This has allowed us to seamlessly integrate our different database products together.

One example is that we had a project where we needed to have a consolidated sales history from all of our regions loaded into a third-party product that runs an SQL database. Of course, all our legacy systems are in the iSeries or AS/400. What we were able to do, since they didn't really integrate directly with an SQL database, was to have them generate CSV files and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was able to pick them up from their respective host systems, translate them, and load them to the SQL database records. It was quite easy and we didn't have to spend a bunch of money trying to add an Oracle Database or some other database that we really didn't need.

In terms of reaction time since implementing the solution, the connectivity between unlike systems is much easier. It involves less programming. The other thing is that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is a JavaScript or a Java-based system within their mapping tool. You can actually write a lot of code in there. We can perform a lot of the translations even within our mapping, whereas we used to have to do custom programming on our back-end systems to fully integrate. Being able to put everything in one place has streamlined the mapping and the integration process. That has saved at least one-third of the time.

The one thing about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) that we really liked is that it's what I would call "platform independent." Most of our systems back in 2012 were on an AS/400 or iSeries and there were some limitations with that. We really wanted to find a product that could communicate with all platforms.

In addition to that, we really like the AS2 communication adapters, which allow us to not use a VAN and for data to be pushed between trading partners. That's a big feature we really like.

Then, in our landscape, we have a lot of AS/400s or iSeries and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has a file service listener that allows data to seamlessly be transferred between the SEEBURGER solution and the AS/400. That was a very big part of it.

There are also a lot of alerting and notifications within it that allow us, even though we have a very small staff, to manage and monitor a very large number of EDI transactions.

One of the biggest features, as well, is the Mapping Designer because that's what we were looking to upgrade in addition to just communication protocols; we wanted to get a more modern mapper that we could use for both EDI documents and other types of unstructured data.

The BIS Front End needs a little bit of refreshing, especially when it comes to setting up new trading partners and trading partner agreements or transactions. It can be a bit clumsy to copy and rename and then go in and modify. That could be improved a little bit.

Also, on the server side, there are a lot of administration and configuration files that you need to go in and do maintenance on. You have to find them in a certain folder so it's very error-prone and it can be a little time consuming unless it's documented. They could pull some of those individual configuration files into the product itself where there's a better user interface for that.

In terms of adding features, they've recently talked about a few. One is a way to manage your web services or your APIs. That would be a big help because, right now, we have four web services and there's quite a lot of setup to each. They're in different areas within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's my understanding that they're going to be able to pull that together so you can view that entire setup in a more streamlined manner. That's something we're looking forward to.

The stability is good, as long as you have the database sized correctly and your server sized with the right amount of processors. It's been very good for us.

We did run into a situation where at one point we didn't have enough memory on our servers. It became slow and we had some issues there. But once we recognized what the issue was and made a correction, it was resolved quite quickly.

So, it's very stable. Of course, we're really dependent on the Windows environment and SQL Server environment. It's only going to be as stable as those platforms are.

We've had to increase the core processing units in our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) central instance, maybe twice, and the same with memory and disk storage. We've been able to wait until the need has come and not use up all that extra processing and memory that we didn't need.

There was documentation on how to do it and when to do it but we still used consulting services to have them direct us. We said, "Here's what we're going to do. Is this correct?" and they were able to lead us through anything we needed to do to scale up and pick up more transactions or more disk space.

So, scalability is pretty good. Right now we're only running a central instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They allow you to split it up into individual instances. If we wanted to separate the US from Europe we could do that, and allocate different resources to each. That's another area where they're scalable. It's been pretty good for us so far.

Technical support is located in Germany and there are different levels of support you can pay for. Regardless of your support level, you're able to open tickets and, based on the severity of the ticket, they get back to you. They're all very knowledgeable of the system and they know where to pinpoint.

I will say that if the issue is something new to your company, something you haven't done before, they will refer you to consulting services which are billable. They won't do any development or the like for you. But they will troubleshoot problems.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is that, while they all speak English, they have a heavy accent in a lot of cases. Sometimes that can be difficult, depending upon who you're working with. Other than that, we've had no problems with their technical support.

The consulting services we work with, because we're in the Michigan area, are all working out of the Atlanta office. We're always working with them over the phone and through emails, so not onsite. They're are also very knowledgeable and they've come to get familiar with our implementation and how we're using their products. It really cuts down on some of the cost when we have a project because the consultants we're working with are familiar with our company. So, overall support is pretty positive.

In terms of response time, if it's a situation where you're saying you're down, they're supposed to call you within one hour, and in my experience, that's always been the case. We haven't had an experience where they're not getting ahold of us. Beyond that, if it's more of a question or you don't understand something, then it falls into another category and it might be later that day or the next day. That's fine. It's been good.

We have our own technical resources onsite. We have a server group and a firewall group and I'm the EDI application guy. We were used to a lot of the terminology and stuff from the past. With that in mind, I thought the setup was quite straightforward.

They provided us with a hardware-sizing questionnaire, which was really helpful in determining our server requirements. Thinking back - it's been six years - it really seemed to go a lot smoother than it could have gone, especially since it was a brand-new product to us.

Regarding our implementation strategy, what we wanted to do first was move all of our communications with our VANs and our direct trading partners into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). That meant we weren't doing the translation and the mapping within the solution, but all of the communications were done through it. What that allowed us to do was to pull all of our trading partners together from Europe and South America and North America into one place and have all the communications flowing through one area. That allowed us to support it a lot more easily and to take advantage of that AS2 protocol.

That was our initial strategy, to do communications, and then follow that up by doing the mapping, one trading partner or one transaction set at a time. And that's what we've done.

With any new product or implementation, usually there's a driving force. One of the things we were asked to do was to implement a web service in Europe that we had no expertise in and we had no platform to run it on. SEEBURGER provided both of those. They showed us how to use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and we used their consulting services to assist us with the back-end integration. So, rather than put this web service or API in another place which would eventually have to be moved to a central location, we were able to incorporate it right into the SEEBURGER product.

Our first phase with communication for all of North America only took three months from the time they loaded it onto the system initially until we were cut over. And then, to pick up Europe, we didn't want to do everything at once. We worked on Europe after that and that was another three months. So, within six months we had our communications moved over and we were then moving onto the other phases.

When we deployed, we had one SEEBURGER consultant who was dedicated to us for that first three-month period. Then we had another one who came in and did some training and some of the planning with us. As far as our own internal resources go, there were three of us who identified all the trading partners and all the nuances of what needed to be set up and tested in the new system. All in all, it was about like three internal people and two SEEBURGER people.

We worked with SEEBURGER employees.

We've had some ROI. I'm not going to be able to give you any dollar numbers, but as far as headcount in my group goes, we used to have four or five people and now it's just me and one other. We're supporting the same number, and more, of trading partners than we used to. Right off the bat, that's a good savings.

All the new adapters are individually priced, which is good. You don't buy the whole system and then, if you don't use it it just sits there. You only buy the stuff you want, which is good. There are some components that are either new or that we didn't need at the time of implementation, so we added them later, or we have plans to add them in the future.

Sometimes it seems a little pricey, especially when some of the stuff is available through freeware, like SFTP communications. You can download a free copy of something and perform those type of functions. But we understand, as an IT group, that those are not long-term solutions that you want in your core processes. It costs a lot more money to buy this stuff from SEEBURGER but I think it's worth it in the long run.

Everything seems expensive to me, so I'm neutral on the pricing and the licensing.

We wanted to be platform-independent from our iSeries and AS/400, and we wanted a more modern product for our EDI integrations. We looked at SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) vs IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. We did a lot of demos and had a lot of conversations between the two. Ultimately, we ended up choosing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but those were the two primary vendors that we were evaluating.

The Sterling Integrator was a little bit more complex than it needed to be. It wasn't straightforward. The mapper was a little bit, I won't say clumsy, but it was a little bit busy, hard to understand. One of the big things we wanted to do was to have a new refresh mapper. Also, the pricing seemed to be a lot higher for what we were getting.

Based on the demos that we had - we had given a script of what we wanted to see from both companies - the way SEEBURGER presented it was much more straightforward and understandable. We could see ourselves moving to that product a lot easier than moving to the Sterling Integrator.

If you are looking to implement SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), talk to other companies that are already using it, some that are in the same industry. That would help you feel more comfortable with what it is you're getting into, and maybe open your eyes to some of the technical capabilities that the solution has that you really hadn't even thought about yet or which weren't presented to you in the sales pitch.

I would also advise doing a lot of planning, because some of the initial setup, design, and planning you do at the onset is hard to change down the road. Take some extra time when you're figuring out how you're going to set up your trading partners, what the naming conventions are, and things of that nature. It'll make it easier.

We've established a pretty good working relationship with our sales contact, and this has been important for us. If we want to have a demo of one of their new products, we're comfortable going to them and saying, "Hey, can you tell me more about this? Hey, can you do a WebEx session to show us how this works?" It's been helpful for us to maintain those relationships.

Obviously, with any new software, training is also something. Don't skimp on that. We did it in phases. We got training on the BIS Front End itself first, and then, when we were ready to start doing the mapping, we got training on the mapping. Down the road, we took some more advanced training. We were able to do it in phases, but it's something that you don't want to skip because there are a lot of good capabilities and different ways of doing things that, if you don't know about them, you may be shorting yourself on the solutions that you deliver.

We don't use the landscape manager but that is something we are interested in. I don't know a lot about it but it keeps track of the configuration of all your implementations so when you do an upgrade, it makes it much easier to manage. That's something we're going to be looking at with the new release of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We don't do clustering. We just have a single instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) so I don't think we're using the Active-Active feature.

There are probably fewer than ten users of the solution in our organization. These are IT folks. They are the ones that really want visibility into the Message Tracking module to view the data that's come in or that went out to confirm that they're receiving the stuff they're looking for. Those transactions aren't with EDI people, they are people to whom we send a payroll file at a bank or a third-party payroll provider. The IT guys may want to monitor it.

Regarding staff required for maintenance, we have five people who are using the BIS Front End and the Mapping Designer. All five of us perform the daily monitoring activities and the trading-partner setup. We have it separated right now. We have three users in Europe and they're able to manage their own customers and suppliers. We do the same in North America. Two of us are doing the regular mapping tasks, while two of the others are occasional mappers. And one person is more of an administrator.

We have plans to continue utilizing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and to use it for more non-EDI types of activity, such as payroll, banking, HR, different sales systems, warehouse management systems, and integration between ERP systems. There is seemingly an endless number of integration projects. In addition to that, we've begun to do a lot of the web services or the APIs, even within our ERP system. So our EDI transaction activity may be staying the same, but we're using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for a lot more of the non-EDI integration and data transformation stuff; not the typical automotive training partners, rather more financial related types of trading partners.

Overall I would rate the solution a nine out of ten, which is really high. I have been really happy with it. Of all the projects where people have come to me, I can't remember having to say, "No, we can't do that." We're able to deliver what I have been advertising since 2012, so it's meeting our needs. Most of the issues we've had have really been things that we've done to ourselves. It hasn't been the product or bugs in the software. Support has been pretty good, we've had consulting services that have gotten to work with us regularly and they know us, so we feel like we're in good shape to tackle some of the newer projects or bigger projects in the future.

The only thing I'm always wanting is that SEEBURGER doesn't seem to be doing a lot of marketing in the U.S. It's a German company, the founder is in Germany, and most of their development staff is over there. Not as many folks are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) in the U.S. They're using IBM and TrustedLink and those type of products. When I talk about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), nobody knows what it is. I have to sell the product and what it can do. If SEEBURGER could do some marketing, do some reaching out to management, the executive level, to give them some visibility into this product, it would make my job easier.

While there are a lot of companies in the U.S. using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we don't have a network or a users group. SEEBURGER has offered some sessions in the past, where you could go to Atlanta and they would give you a three-day update on new things they're doing, but there's no forum for users, other than on Facebook. There isn't really a users group that I know of where we could get together and do things, have conferences, etc.

We primarily use it for standard EDI practice forecasts, firms, ASNs, invoices, etc. We use everything here, including VDA, EDIFACT, and ANSI, but we are also now having our customers send us drawing files, and then we're sending them off to our engineers.

Our business has grown to have 14 major customers, which implies orders of greater than 200 parts per customer. If we include ship-to then we're probably talking closer to 50 new customers that have moved to EDI. I don't think we would have made it through the pandemic, to be honest, without this.

I have a tiny team in Spain that was entering every one of those requirements manually until we switched over to SEEBURGER, and then we could get them added pretty quickly. Now, for the first time in our history, we are adding Asian customers. Branches in India and China are starting to get EDI started, which has never happened before.

BIS provides me with everything in a unified platform and I haven't needed to add any third-party solutions. 

This product helps us to automate processes. Previously, we would have normally manually entered requirements and now, we just let it read them in automatically. As an example, just one customer with a 200 part requirement that goes out over 12 months would normally have taken my team two hours per week, just to enter the requirements. Now, it just happens and there is no work required at all from the team. In this regard, it has absolutely helped us to increase efficiency. 

At this point, automation hasn't led us to reduce the number of employees that we have. As such, I don't think that we've decreased any of our costs. 

SEEBURGER has helped us to enable digital business transformation. Every time we add a new customer, there is a digital footprint. This is no longer a manual process.

The fact that BIS is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment is very important because it means that we could take from one to the other. That is amazing.

The product somewhat helps to future-proof our business. I can add new adapters, for example. We're strictly on EDI and I know that they have more offerings than that, but we have not moved past it yet. Certainly, they are not stopping with EDI, which is good.

The most valuable feature for me is being able to make changes on-premises, without having to contact SEEBURGER. It allowed me to work on my timeframes, which is important because if I didn't hear back from a customer then it wasn't wasting SEEBURGER's time. I'm able to work more independently. 

The cost models have room for improvement. There are different licensing models between Europe and the USA, which is something that I don't understand. This is an aspect that needs to be improved.

Java is very old technology and they should move away from it, to anything that's better.

We have been using SEEBURGER since July 1st, 2017, four years ago.

With our on-premises implementation, we never had any issues with uptime or stability.

Scalability-wise, I don't know of any limits for us, so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

At this point, we only have two users, although we need to enlarge that role. I am responsible for the customer setup, connection setup, and map design. My other colleague also does customer setup and communication setup, but no map design.

We plan on expanding our usage because we're going to start moving our Asian colleagues. As soon as we find a customer that's able to do EDI with them, we will turn it on. We're certainly increasing in that world.

We now approach every customer and look for EDI opportunities. Now that we've determined that we can handle receiving CAD-type drawings through it, we are going to send that to different plants. We certainly plan on using it more, and I know due to COVID, we've never experienced the number of customers asking us for EDIs as we are now.

With respect to support, it's best-of-breed for me. I still get to work with my American counterparts at SEEBURGER, but my contract is in Europe. When I do need true support, I tend to get most of it from America, so that works in my time zone. Alternatively, when I use the service desk, it's support from the European side.

I like working with the SEEBURGER support. The service desk itself now has a chat, and that has saved me days because they answer the question right when I was on the phone with them, or on chat. That's been amazing. The service desk is always helpful. I'd say 95% of the time, I only have to use the service desk, which is included in our maintenance.

With my support in America, I have one particular person that the emails go to. Unless it's a big issue, he usually has an answer back out to me that day, so costing me far less than if it had to go to other areas. It's been a dream.

Everywhere in the world used something different before SEEBURGER.

In our American offices, we used TrustedLink, whereas, in Canada, we used Atos. In Europe, they used other packages. In Spain, for example, they used their own desktop version for EDI integration. We have also used SAP PI and others.

I don't know why we switched to the current solutions but it was done in conjunction with our SAP rollout.

In this IT world, it would be classified as quite straightforward.

In America in 2017, we started with a cloud-based deployment. Since then, we have migrated everything to an on-premises server in Europe. At the time, we went with a single point of communication, so we were only using OFTP2 when we started. It was a single server install. 

When it comes to our mappings, we've gotten very complex, especially because we merged the two. It is relevant to note that we have a two-stage implementation. At first, when it was just for Germany, I don't know that it was classified as very complex. When it was just for the USA, it was not classified as very complex. But when you blended the two, we added a lot more complexity to our world. Every process is broken down as "Is this a US EDI or is this European EDI?"

Effectively, we doubled our complexity at that point.

I don't know the original German timeframe but for the US implementation, it took a little more than two months to deploy.

For our first implementation, we asked SEEBURGER to do all of the work for us. I gave them all of my sample files, and all of my specs, and they took care of all of it for me. I concentrated on inbound first and then outbound, as per normal. After that, I would check the flow-through to see that the data went where I expected it to.

In that implementation, they did 75% of the work, and I only did 25% because I was rolling out SAP. I was in charge of two plants at the time, so I couldn't do EDI all by myself. All of the departments were rolled out and they did all of it for us. The support was perfect and it was exactly what I needed.

In 2018 or 2019, we moved back to an on-premises deployment. At that point, they were able to assign the connection guy to us and then one person for the maps. He took care of double-checking and finding a way to merge the current on-premises and our former cloud processes together for us.

At that point, I was able to assist a lot more because I could concentrate on the EDI, and I also had a colleague in Germany that could work with me. That time, it was more a 50/50 process, with us helping to deploy it. We started on January 1st, and we went live with that merge on April 1st. It was a little bit longer of an implementation move but we weren't as desperate for a start date. Overall, we had no issues moving from the cloud back to on-premises.

The US SEEBURGER staff were fantastic with the second one. When we found out that our implementation was not going to work on the German one, because somebody forgot to sign us up on our side, the American people stepped in. They were able to get me up and running with about two months of prep, and then a bit more because I needed them to help me more than they should have had to help me for the summer that year.

It is unheard of to get that many customers up and running as fast as they did for us.

I will be in charge of maintenance when it's time, but I will steal somebody from my operations IT team to assist me with that. Other than making new maps, to this point, there has been no real maintenance that we've been doing.

We do not have exact figures for ROI at the moment but the one example, where we take two hours per week down to zero, is priceless right now.

I wasn't involved in the contract negotiations, but I can say that we pay per site. It is based on the expected usage per month. I would like to find a way to change this and not pay per site because I don't want to pay for a site that has one EDI turned on, and pay the same amount for them.

We pay for a maximum number of setups, then we pay per customer map, and we pay maintenance on each one of those. BIS provides the flexibility to pay as you grow. The price of each customer map is €200 and the hourly rate for maintenance is fairly reasonable.

We budgeted for ten days of maintenance at €160 per hour, for a total of €12,000. We purchased the block so that we wouldn't have to pause our operations but we hardly use it. That contract started in 2019 and we've barely made a dent in it.

I highly recommend that people negotiate strong and hard on their customer map contract. I've decreased our European one in half, and I still will fight to get it down again. I prefer the pricing model out of the USA by far. There is a significant difference between these two pricing models, which is something that I don't understand.

As part of our monitoring, we run checks to see if we're close to where we expect to stay in terms of usage.

In addition, you have to buy each adaptor that you're going to use. These include OFTP2, AS2, SFTP, and others. I highly recommend that you figure out your market and pick the best one for your marketplace, instead of paying for all of them.

We did evaluate other options in 2015, although I can't recall the names of the products.

I am not running the most recent version because I don't have a test environment, so I don't want to upgrade and risk things breaking before I can test it. The plan is to move to version 6.7 in the fall, meaning that I'd be skipping a version. The most compelling reason to adopt the new version is the security. It has a higher security rating than the current one. Also, new tools are available that I want to take advantage of.

BIS could provide real-time data insight for our organization but at this time, we're not using it in that format.

At this point, using this solution has not helped us to decrease the time to market. We're probably too far out in the company to do that. I don't have any customers that are taking business faster because we can do EDI. In fact, most of my customers are the reason that we're not moving faster for EDI.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to fully understand the differences between the on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions. Also, start negotiating early, especially if you have to do your negotiating in Europe. In America, they're much more flexible. You should definitely start earlier than we did because we were far too late.

The biggest lesson that I learned when using this product had to do with designing my own process maps. It is important to learn the map DB system because you can make it very strong and it makes your life much more flexible. For example, you can have a colleague that never has to touch a design or make changes because you put it into a process map instead. They can just use it within a table and never open the designer. It's fabulous. I would concentrate on getting the most knowledge out of that as a could and in fact, it's still what I've written down for my self-design training sessions that I ask them to do for me.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

This is just to transfer files securely within the Mylan network, and a few instances from the outside too. It is just to transfer files. Like a postman, it moves the files between the systems with no data transformation

We have the on-premise solution and are only using one feature of this product. Most of our solutions are on-premise, as our security team prefers it that way.

It used to take half an hour to move one file from one location to another. Now, it takes 10 minutes. 

We did not procure this software as a reason to improve our organization. We procured this software to replace the existing one.

We have found this tool useful.

The solution is flexible when it comes to adding integrations. It is much easier to use than the other tools we have to move the files. Across the board, we can move files in a short amount of time compared to our other existing tools.

It is stable. We haven't faced any major issues since the implementation of this software.

From what I understand, scalability is much easier. However, we haven't increased our volumes or interfaces. We are still only using 20 to 30 percent. We are far away from any increase or decrease of the system sizes.

Our users are mostly the technical team. We have five to seven people using the system. It is the technical team only, not the end-users, and most of them are IT engineers.

We have more than 300 interfaces in this platform.

We have only requested technical support a couple of times. We haven't faced any issues with them. They are very good.

We procured this software to replace webMethods. 

The initial setup is not the straightforward. It took couple of months for us to set up.

We had planned to do it in a month and migrate all the file transfer interfaces into this new platform, but it took us two months for installation, then another two months to move the interfaces. It may not be a software issue, because there are so many other factors, e.g., resources, dealing with partners, etc.

We accepted the help of the SEEBURGER team, making it a typical software setup and installation process.

We have seen ROI.

The pricing and licensing is very competitive.

We evaluated SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and a couple of other tools. We found SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to be better suited for our organization.

The Active-Active helps handle larger loads without time delays.

Our reaction time has changed by 50% since implementing this solution.

There are so many moving components. Even if it is on-premise, some servers need to be on the DMZ and some need to be inside of the firewall, so working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) made it easier.

SEEBURGER, along with four or five other big vendors, focuses in the integration space. When you talk about data integration, there are two major aspects of it. There is the transactional messaging side and the batch file-based side. My team is focused on the batch file-based side of things. We have a completely different team (with a different set of software) who does the transactional messaging aspects. We are using it for all secure file transfer use cases throughout the organization with multiple different data patterns: moving data within the company, moving data to and from outside of the company, and ad hoc file transfer. Any type of file-based secure connectivity goes through our team using this product.

Currently, it is on-prem. We have a cloud initiative, which has been rolling for a couple of years now, like most companies. It is on our radar for later this year. We are going to spin up another project to consider either moving to our own AWS or SEEBURGER's AWS and their iPaaS environment.

No matter how much you automate in the file transfer space, there is always more to be uncovered in a big company. Users, especially in the business area, will start doing their own thing and interacting with some external webpage to upload or download files manually every day. They kind of incorporate it into their daily tasks. When we discovered that, we were like, "Why are you wasting all that time? What if you are out?" That has been one part of starting to consume different website APIs, to push and pull files to and from various vendor websites that was historically done by users manually. So, there is an automation aspect to it. Beyond that, application-to-application connectivity, which historically went over protocols like SFTP or batch files, is conforming over to APIs now because everybody wants to be faster and use APIs. Therefore, a lot of these application-to-application data flows have changed over to APIs over the last year. For example, I used to get one API request a year in past years. This year, I get one or two new ones every week or two. APIs are just taking over.

It is good anytime that you can take a user who is doing something manually every day out of the picture and automate a process, e.g., going to a vendor's webpage to pull or push a file every day. Although there was a one-time cost to do the development work, you reap the ongoing benefits because now you don't need to have that user spending time doing it every day. You don't have to worry about if that user is out or gone for a week on vacation. Things can just happen automatically. There is definitely a benefit.

Because we are in the financial services industry, PCI is huge. You have to comply with PCI regulations. That has primarily to do with credit card numbers, but really any account number or sensitive data. What is nice about SEEBURGER BIS is it has made it easy to patch our yearly PCI audits with this thing called PCI realm. You can configure any of your data flows into that PCI realm that you need to. It automatically complies with regulations, offloading the data as soon as the data flows through the system. It doesn't store any copies. It offloads the data encrypted in an encrypted state to our PCI zone to be stored for X days during our backup period. That is all out-of-the-box functionality, so you don't have to waste your time trying to figure out how to comply with PCI compliance rules because it is already built into the software. You just have to configure it in that PCI realm.

We are getting these use cases now that APIs are coming into the picture where, historically in our company, the data integration has been broken into the two major areas. Transactional messaging is on one side and batch file-based transfers are on the other side. Now, you are starting to see those two areas kind of merged together. Because usually when you get a batch file over API, they want us to break that batch file up into individual transactions, iterate over all the records in that batch file, and post them as transactions into our messaging system. 

There is now this interesting sort of convergence between the messaging space and the batch file-based space which is now sort of coming together because of APIs. So, this is another area that I am seeing a lot of requests for lately, "Hey, I want you to still get a batch file like you have always done in the past, but it is going to come over API now instead of over something like SFTP. In the API, I want you to iterate over every record in that batch file and post those transactions individually." This is another big growth area right now. Therefore, I am working on solutions to be able to support that. This would be an area of growth because we will be using these batch files to post into more internal systems and do it more flexibly as individual transactions, instead of as a big batch file. This is an area that we are looking to grow in the next year.

You could make the argument for time to market if there was a user doing something manually every day, then we came along with SEEBURGER BIS and automated that. So, instead of waiting around for the user to load the file once a day at whatever time they do it, we had the system automatically pull the file, possibly early morning, and pass it through immediately into the back-end processing system. There are some cases like that, where historically it took eight hours, because a user had to get engaged, do something manually, maybe convert something manually to transform the data themselves, and then they would have to manually load it. Here, we come along and run a workflow in two seconds that streams it right through. Therefore, you could make some arguments that we sped up time to market by automating previously manual processing. However, as far as just general B2B file transfer or application-to-application, I don't know that you could claim that the software itself has sped up time to market, other than just coding workflows a bit more efficiently to take out seconds or minutes to make them run faster.

The most valuable features are the solution's stability as well as its ease of use and flexibility to configure a workflow with as many (or as few) steps as you need. It offers us more value to our internal customers because we can do so much more than if we had a software that was super rigid. If you are looking for a software that emulates writing a piece of code where you can have as many steps as you want in whatever order you want to, this is the one. SEEBURGER BIS is so much better than other solutions because of this.

Their entire software suite is 100 percent homegrown. Every component that they have built was built to be integrated with another component. It is all one product. Due to acquisition and the integration space being a big thing, other vendors tend to go, "Buy this, buy that, and then buy that." They try to bolt them all together and make three different vendors' products work in concert as one. My experience has been that it usually leads to confusion as well as bugginess and problems. SEEBURGER BIS is all one product, all homegrown, and everything is fully integrated.

API adoption is on the rise everywhere. Even in the file-based space, APIs are being adopted a lot, especially at our company. One thing I like about SEEBURGER and their transformation engine is it is completely integrated with JSON file formats, which are typically used in API calls. I just did an API over the last couple of weeks with a complex data structure and SEEBURGER BIS Mapper handled that with no problems. As we look to the future, APIs are really taking hold. It is nice that SEEBURGER BIS can totally handle whatever comes our way that is API related. 

We occasionally get ZIP files. Sometimes the ZIP file has one file inside of it, and sometimes the ZIP file might have 30 files inside of it. We have been working with SEEBURGER to enhance their PKUNZIP process to be able to unzip multiple files in a single workflow instead of just one file. This is still something that is in process. 

I have been at my current organization for five years and using SEEBURGER BIS during that time. Our company's relationship started with SEEBURGER in 2013. 

In five years, we have never had an unplanned outage that was caused by the software. Every company has outages, but in our case, they have always been caused by our own infrastructure, e.g., a router went down, a cable went bad, or a switch had a problem. It was not caused by the software layer; it was always caused by the infrastructure and things that are under our control, not the vendor's. There is a peace of mind as a developer with not having to worry about having to be up in the middle of the night with software not working like it is supposed to. The stability of this software is by far so much better than other software solutions that I have used in the past.

I have come from a place where other software was up and down all the time. I would have to be up at night, burning sleep, and trying to support outages. To be in a place where we have no unplanned outages is great, you get a lot more sleep, which is good.

It is mostly our team who has access to the front-ends to develop configure processings. We don't make it too widely available across the company. We have a few pockets of people who can log into the portal to view their data on their own kind of self-service. Other than that, we mostly do behind the scenes data integration, moving data between applications and external partners. That is all done by our team. It is not done widely throughout the company, it is just one small data integration team. We serve every application in the company and are connected with a couple of 1,000 external partners as well. The touch points are many, but the people who have access to the GUI to actually do the work are few.

The scalability is pretty good. We haven't had to do a ton of scaling exercises over the years. Our volumes have stayed fairly static and grown at a certain rate every year. We just reassess them with our professional services person once a year and make sure that we are watching our metrics, memory, and storage really closely. We have that in our daily monitoring. As we see it going up, we just go, "Okay, we need to add some more RAM memory or more Java heap space." 

I would say the process of scaling is pretty easy as long as you stay on top of it and monitor your throughput really closely to know the numbers, knowing when something is growing. If you put in a new integration that brings in a whole lot more traffic, obviously you have to reassess and make sure that you are scaled to handle it. I have got a project like that coming up soon which will take us from thousands of files a day up to millions of transactions a day. This is something where we are looking closely at scalability and figuring out what is needed to be able to support that new volume, and not have an impact on the existing.

The fact that the solution is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment makes it flexible and scalable for us. Every company has cloud initiatives going on right now. To know that there are options out there gives our company more things to think through and price out. We have done a lot of pricing exercises around those three different options, so we have a pretty good sense now of the cost differential between on-premise versus cloud versus vendor iPaaS cloud. We know where things are going to fall cost-wise, so now it is just a matter of, where do you want to put your money? For example, do you want to have more staff to maintain the system yourself with all your infrastructure people, or do you want to outsource that, pay that money and some more to the vendor to maintain it for you? So, it kind of just depends on where your priorities are as an organization. I think it is a good thing that there are multiple options. It has given us a chance to slice and dice the numbers.

Since the very beginning of the relationship between my organization and SEEBURGER, they have been solid for everything from their support team to account managers and sales to professional services. We have always had a contract with professional services. We have used their developer personnel throughout the year on various efforts, and it has always been a solid relationship. It is one of the better ones that I have worked with. They are just an email away when we need to reach out to them. 

In the case of opening support cases, it is pretty simple. You usually hear back within a day. Even though they are based in Germany, they turn around your request pretty quickly.

You occasionally get a use case that comes along, and it is something new that hasn't been done before. SEEBURGER BIS out-of-the-box might do part of it, but not all of it. In those cases, we submit an enhancement request to SEEBURGER who gets it to their engineering team. Usually, those are turned around fairly readily. 

The enhancement onboarding process at SEEBURGER is pretty good compared to other vendors that I have worked with. We have a monthly meeting with our SEEBURGER contact in professional services. We keep a list of things, and say, "Here are the things that we need help with and our enhancement requests." Then, that person reaches out to engineering and gets an ETA, so we have a date of when that thing will be delivered. It is not like you give it over to SEEBURGER and forget about it, then it never happens. There is ongoing communication to the right people who know the software, what is needed, and when it will be delivered. Even when it comes to things that we don't have but need, like the multi-file PKUNZIP, usually it is a fairly good experience.

Before we started with SEEBURGER BIS, we had as many as 13 different integration software spread out across our company. Over the early years that I was here at my organization, we were able to consolidate that down to just SEEBURGER BIS. We reduced a lot of extra costs from using other software products and having a lot of extra things to support. Our support costs went down for infrastructure, etc. Thus, it is nice to have everything fully integrated into one product that can do everything.

The number one reason why I would not want to go back and use another software after having experienced SEEBURGER BIS is its flexibility when it comes to file transfer workflow. You can configure your file transfer workflow completely customized. You can put the steps in any order that you want. Your file transfer flow might have three or 20 steps. You simply bring in those steps as activities in a workflow in any order that you want. For example:

• If you want to receive a file and immediately transform it
• Call a database, get some data, and bring it into your workflow.
• Do a transformation or adjust the line feed. 
• Write it out to multiple destination systems. 

You can put all those workflow steps in any order that you want. That makes it just like a piece of code which has been abstracted into a front end webpage. If you think about how your code would flow, that is exactly how you can make the software flow. 

Other vendors that I have encountered in other jobs have been a lot more rigid than that. Other vendor software tends to have one canned way that you can run data through the system. You receive a file, maybe call a map and transform the file, and then you write the file out. At the very end of the process, you might be able to call a post-process, where you want to run a shell script. However, usually other software is pretty rigid in nature, such that you have to conform your data flow to how that vendor software works, because it only works one way. Because of that rigidity of other vendors' software, in order to accomplish a full end-to-end workflow, sometimes you have to spin up three different workflows and tie them all together to get all the different steps done that you want. That is not at all the case with SEEBURGER BIS. 

With SEEBURGER BIS, you can string as many different activities together in your workflows as you want. You can put them in any order, like a piece of code. One leads into the next, which leads into the next. It is just very flexible from that vantage point. This makes it so easy to use and reduces the number of moving parts that you need to have. It is just a lot less frustrating not having to conform to how some other vendor software works.

We had a variety of software products, so it wasn't a straightforward effort to consolidate all those different use cases and patterns down to their software, because all the existing ones were hard to discover. Sometimes, you experienced that the people who originally set them up were gone. There was a lot of work trying to understand the existing use cases in order to migrate them into SEEBURGER BIS. 

With any large first time installation of a completely different vendor's product, I think there is going to be some pain. That has just been my experience. You are trying to understand how to fit their product into your custom network. It isn't a one size fits all, so you need to tweak and tune it to get it to fit right in your network. The types of machines and network that you use are usually custom by company. I wasn't around for the original installation, but from what I heard, there were some of those sort of pain points during the initial install. From people that I talked to who were here at the time, it sounded like a lot of it just had to do with getting the platforms that were in use (at that time) to be configured and work with SEEBURGER BIS properly. So, I don't know if it was necessarily that the install of their software was bad or hard to work with. I think it had as much to do with the specific systems that were being used here at that time, so tuning was needed to get it to work right for memory, storage, etc. 

While there was some pain, I think it was equal parts their software compared to our systems and infrastructure and trying to pair the two together. At the same time, we were consolidating 12 or 13 different vendor products down into one. A lot of time went into understanding all those different use cases and how to properly configure them the first time and SEEBURGER BIS. So, there was just a lot of learning and discovery that went along with the initial install.

The relationship started in late 2012 to early 2013. It didn't actually get put into production for usage until 2014, so there was a year to a year and a half of planning that went on between the staff at SEEBURGER and the staff at my organization, from the infrastructure and the integration teams, to try to lay out how it needed to be installed as well as what kind of machines were needed and how much memory. That was a long, drawn-out process. I wasn't here at the time, but I imagine it wasn't the highest priority here at the time. So, there was a good period of time when they were just in that discovery mode trying to understand what they wanted to buy, for example:

• What would we need to install it? 
• What team was going to support it? 
• Were we going to outsource it to a managed services provider? 
• Were we going to hire a staff to do it internally? 

All that type of stuff had to be worked out in advance, so there was a lot of planning that went into it.

They went with an outsource managed services provider at the start because they needed staff quickly to be able to start on the migration work to get all the integrations understood as well as out of the old software and into the new one. There is always this learning when you go full-on managed services, as you don't get high levels of expertise. You mostly get people who can turn stuff around quickly without thinking about it too much. Then, towards the end is when they hired a couple others and me to try to get some more senior staff in to steer the ship and standardize everything that had been configured so far as well as come up with design patterns. So, towards the tail end is when they hired some senior developers to try to get things under control and standardize use cases.

During the migration, because it was a managed services provider, there were a whole lot of resources involved during the big part of the migration, like maybe 20 people just cranking out and moving stuff from the old systems to the new system. As things got closer to being migrated, we got down to a team of four or five people. There was a bit of managed services assistance offshore to kind of help out off-hours, and that has not really changed a whole lot. There are four or five individuals who handle the bulk of operational aspects and support as well as the engineering aspects, so it is a pretty small team.

The two areas of ROI that stand out:

1. User manual task automation because you're reducing manual time.
2. Two or three pockets of different data integration patterns that were outsourced to vendors over the years for various reasons, so there has been a return on investment there to be able to in-house those integrations from a vendor and save on that vendor cost because you have to pay a vendor to do that integration work. Why not use your own software and do it in-house if you can? 

I have had exposure to other big vendors over the years and would have to say the pricing is pretty typical. They all fall into a common pricing range, at least the bigger vendors: Axway, IBM Sterling, Globalscape, and SEEBURGER. They all fall into that mid-tier pricing. So, SEEBURGER is commensurate with other large integration vendors operating in this space. Maybe it is lower than some of the really high-end ones. You can get some of these high-end transactional messaging integration systems, like TIBCO, that tend to be kind of on a higher echelon of pricing. I would say SEEBURGER is more mid-level.

Every vendor has professional services to offer. That is where they make a lot of their money, in PSO time. Different companies feel different ways about using professional services hours. Luckily, for us, our company has always been pretty open to it. We use that professional services time sparingly throughout the year: for critical key projects, things that we've never done before, or if we're doing a major system upgrade or a version upgrade. Those things have to be done right. Although you could probably figure it out on your own with enough time, you can usually do it faster with a professional services person in the mix. That would be the only other cost: If you choose to use some of their professional services labor as a bucket of time throughout the year, like we do.

As you spin up new components or use cases, occasionally more licensing is needed to turn on more features of the software suite, but that is common across all the vendors.

I have been in this field for 25 years. I have worked with a lot of the larger integration vendors over the years. Integration vendor software tends to be fairly similar in functionality. You can pretty readily move from one product to another product and not lose too many steps, as far as understanding and utilization, i.e., user experience. However, there are some things that set SEEBURGER BIS apart from the others. I don't want to go to another vendor software after using SEEBURGER BIS, because it has these "things" that make it that much better and easier to work with. It just makes my life as a developer so much easier.

A lot of the integration vendors have a software development kit that usually looks like an Eclipse plugin for Eclipse IDE. This allows you to code extensions to the base functionality of the software suite. If the software does X, Y, and Z, but you want to add A, B and C to the end of it, then you can build your own extension to the base code and plug it in. Most of the vendors have that these days. Comparing SEEBURGER to some of the other providers, SEEBURGER BIS requires the least amount of professional services know-how. For example, that PSO level of knowledge which is sometimes needed, where you get into your own development effort to write an extension, and halfway and you are like, "What the heck?" Then, you need to have the expense to get professional services involved to help you out. However, with SEEBURGER BIS, I have been able to code many of my own extensions using their software development kit on my own with very little insight from their professional services. It is very usable and user-friendly compared to some of the other solutions.

On some vendor products in order to find logging, especially if they have bolted together multiple vendor's products, you have to go explore here, there, and everywhere. With SEEBURGER BIS, it is all together. It is not hard to find the logging. It is all pretty readable too. You don't have to go through a lot of jargon to find what you are looking for. Probably the best thing about the logging is that you can't necessarily get logging down to the packet capture level in other vendors' products. So, if you're doing an SFTP or an HTTP connection and you want to capture the packets, I have needed to install things like Wireshark or Fiddler with other vendors' software to catch the packets going across the wire to see what is going on. In SEEBURGER BIS, you can turn on the packet capturing ability and just go look at it within the product itself. You don't have to waste time installing Wireshark and getting it all connected to your network because you can get that level of logging right out of the application. 

I have been through migrations a lot over the years. This one was interesting to read about because they were crazy about it. The last vendor had some problems, so they went and actually started with a list of 50 integration vendors. You go, "Holy cow, are there really that many integration vendors even out there?" There are, but they range in size. So they started with this gigantic list that they probably pulled from some vendor, like Gartner. Then, they boil down 50 to 30 then to 15. Ultimately, after looking at all the use cases and what they wanted to get out of them, they boiled 15 down to three, then they had the last three come in-house and give their dog and pony shows along with their overviews of their software. Just based on the use cases and flexibility, SEEBURGER was chosen over all those different vendors. There is some pretty good amount of documentation that was written up on that process. It was pretty thorough.

Among the bigger vendors out there in the marketplace, IBM Sterling, Globalscape, Axway, and Cleo were some of the big vendors in the mix. 

Deciding to go with SEEBURGER BIS was a mixture of the GUI and simplicity for the team to understand. A lot of the team here, other than just a couple of us, are operational-level folks. They don't necessarily have broad computer science foundational skills. Therefore, the GUI interface had to be easy enough to use but these types of folks could work in it without too much trouble. The big things were: 

1. Ease of use in understanding the screens and how to tie together a workflow without too much developer-level knowledge. 
2. The capability to handle use cases. All these different 12 or 13 vendors were doing different data flow patterns, so SEEBURGER BIS had to be able to support all of them.
3. Stability, because the previous vendor had problems with it. That had been a pain point which they were trying to solve at the time. 

So, it was really a mixture of those three things.

Going into the next calendar year, we are going to migrate to some formulation of cloud, which is kind of the way everybody's going, and then we will also be migrating to version 6.7.

I work a lot in our integration for error/fault handling and reporting system metrics, making sure all the components are running, raising incidents automatically if there is a failure, and raising incidents if there is a problem with the software. Because I sort of operate in that monitoring space, I was hoping that monitoring would be easier and better in the new version. They have a new component that they have added, which has changed names a few times. This will allow us to do different kinds of file transfer, failure, and error types in any software. There are lots of different points of failure that you catch when you do monitoring, e.g., conductivity failure or transformation error. This tool will take the error logging for every kind of error and standardizes it into one stream of data into one software component. In the past, I had to read error log messages in a map and pull out very specific error reasons and populate them into the auto-generated incidents. 

In version 6.7, all that code that I wrote to map out those error codes, which are all different for each type of error, is all standardized and common. It is already in the software components. You don't have to do extra code to parse out and find those different kinds of errors and metadata related to each type of error. This is because it has already been standardized and put into the GUI. The GUI can also integrate with ServiceNow and other ITSM systems to auto-generate incidents. Therefore, a lot of that behind the scenes monitoring code that I have written in the past can go away because now it has all been sort of consolidated down and standardized by SEEBURGER. I am really hoping to be able to get the funding to purchase this extra component going into version 6.7, so we can move away from our sort of homegrown code into out-of-the-box monitoring.

We are always looking for new use cases in the broader integration space to try to bring in and automate what our team is responsible for. There are some other parts of the company that have historically outsourced different pieces of integration. So, we are in the process of in-housing one of those now, and then there is another one coming down the road that is sort of more into the SWIFT area. Banking has this concept of SWIFT, which is an integration to the banking network. SEEBURGER BIS has some out-of-the-box functionality to offer there, which is another space where we are looking to expand services.

We use it mostly for behind the scenes data flows. Other than a few cases, we don't necessarily serve up screens with metadata about the data that is flowing through the system to facilitate use cases for data insights. This is an area where this new version 6.7 also has more functionality. It can present more data for what is flowing through the system, bringing the data and important parts of that data up into the GUI so you could reach out to a business team, and say, "Hey, I know you probably use some other product for your day-to-day operations. But, what if we could serve up this data that you care about on a screen? Would you no longer need that other software that you are currently using? Because then you can just log into SEEBURGER BIS and see the data there."

The solution’s ability to future-proof our business is positive because I have a pretty good sense for what is out there in our organization that we are currently not involved in as well as what we probably could be or should be involved in based on what our responsibilities are to the organization. As I look at other areas of things that we are currently not doing, then I look at SEEBURGER BIS, and say, "Can it do that stuff?" The answer has always been, "Yes." You might have to buy some more licensing, but every vendor software is that way. They don't work for free. So, I would say that the feature functionality is very broad, such that any other area of data integration that we have come across in the company that we are not supporting, which is being supported manually or by some other team using some other software, we then look at SEEBURGER BIS and we have always found the functionality there, even if we had to buy an additional license or something to turn on a new feature.

Biggest lesson learnt:I have learned a ton about APIs that I didn't previously know. The software helped facilitate that knowledge because the functionality was there and I had decided to figure out how to use it. However, in figuring out how to use it, I learned a lot about how APIs work. That has been probably my biggest personal area of learning in the last one to two years: Being immersed in APIs and the file transfer space, learning all the different SOAP versus REST, and calling service operations and methods. All of that, I learned by using SEEBURGER BIS to set up API integrations of various flavors.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

We use the product to process for our EDI/B2B platform. It supports various transaction formats including X12, EDIFACT, cXML and xCBL. We also use the product to handle various communication protocols, including AS2, FTP, HTTP and PGP encryption.

The product has the ability to handle high volumes of data efficiently. The front-end has provided us the ability to see issues quickly and is enabled for quick and easy remediation.

• It's hard to single out a single feature. The product has some wonderful aspects to it.
• Mapping Designer provides excellent flexibility.
• BIS front-end provides high visibility.
• IDoc Connector provides seamless connection to our SAP system.

The ability to bind a mapping to an agreement seems a bit clunky. It would be nice to have a better way of navigating to a map name rather than using a drop down list.

It is very stable. It has 99.9 percent uptime.

It is highly scalable.

Technical support has been varied through the years. As SEEBURGER has grown, they have made changes to the tech support area which can be challenging at times. There is room for improvement here, but SEEBURGER is moving in the right direction.

We used the TrustedLink Enterprise (TLE) solution. We switched because the product did not provide all the features that we needed to grow our eCommerce platform. The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was one of a few which provided translation for various formats, communications, and integration into SAP, all under one hood.

The initial set up was done by SEEBURGER consulting. It can be complex due to various factors, such as server settings, database settings, and security settings. 

Having the SEEBURGER consulting team perform the installation alleviates a lot of headaches and ensures a stable system.

We have seen ROI.

The cost of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can be considered high. We have elected to have SEEBURGER consulting do the installation. Licensing could also be considered high. However, one would be hard pressed to find another product that does all that this one does.

We evaluated the Gentran's AI (Application Integrator).

Overall, its an excellent product. I would highly recommend it.

We use the solution to tap and transform traffic. 

The tool's performance doesn't get affected by transformation loads. You can write any number of rules, filtering criteria, transformations, etc. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite does not have an end user or subscriber console which can show the traffic status. You have to be reliant on the consultants to do the customization. 

I have been working with the product for three and a half years. 

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is scalable. 

The tool's installation was easy. 

I would rate SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case for it is as an integration tool. We've got lots of systems. We are a service company in warehousing and transport and we've got a lot of customers. We are a 3PL company so we do transport for a lot of the big retailers. All of this has to be integrated. We've got small applications running everywhere, so any data which flows through from one application to another requires SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Warehousing is our major function. We get orders from our clients, retailers that you know. Some of them use EDI, some use API, and some use web services. They come through our system and they get formatted into our standard warehouse management system, which is Manhattan. Order information has to be formatted in the Manhattan XML format.

On the transport side, there are different applications. We have Freighter which does the load planning and then there is route planning which is a separate application hosted by Paragon. The route planning information goes from the orders which we received to the Paragon system, and the orders also go to Freighter for load planning.

In addition, there is information from the warehouse system that has to go back to our big retail customers, such as stock received, dispatch confirmation, receipt confirmation, and any stock adjustments. There are different types of interfaces which go back and forth between our customers and our warehouse management systems.

There is some B-to-B integration and then we have application-to-application as well. For example, the warehouse management system might talk directly to the transport system, which is web-service or API-driven. Sometimes they can't do it themselves, so SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) will step in to capture the data from the warehouse management system. It will do the API service to communicate with another system and get the results and push them. So it acts as a gateway for everything coming in and out of our company, a secure gateway.

Many of our customers still use file transfer, so we use SFTP a lot. Most of the interfaces are migrating to web services, SOAP or API. Those are the latest but we still have a lot of SFTP used.

It is hosted by us, internally.

It helps in communications. It's the only gateway between our client systems and any internally-hosted or cloud-hosted systems. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an interface between them. It provides a lot of benefits to our customers. If SEEBURGER were to go down, our company would be in limbo.

It's a very vital system. We are dependent on it because we have hundreds of major customers, all of which are big retailers. Without SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), their orders and other communications may not go to the warehouse. There might be manual processes but that would be very hard.

It's been a good tool so far. It's helped us do things which we were not able to do. Most applications nowadays are third-party applications which require data in particular formats and there are restrictions on them. We can't modify third-party applications. The best we can do is use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to massage or reformat the data from one format to another and say, "Okay, if you want it this way you will get it this way."

That's what SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has been good at: communicating between two applications, changing formats and using the required protocols. Some might have applications which are very old and they can't do more than FTP or SFTP. With SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) we've got that flexibility. We can have one site communicating in an old FTP or SFTP style, or via file transfer. And with other applications, we could have API or a web service call or some other protocol used to send information. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) acts as an intermediary between them.

We wanted to use API. We were told that in 6.52 we could use API management. Later on, we found that API management wasn't that completely integrated into the 6.52 solution, and if you wanted to have the whole API suite you might have to go to 6.7, the latest one.

We are waiting for that. There is talk that next year we might try to migrate to 6.7. Migration is not an issue on our side, but it's the customer migration which takes a lot of time. That involves a lot of concern and hard work because we have to have the customers onboarded as well and they need to do some testing. It's always really hard to get the customers to find time for that.

It has been quite stable. We haven't had any issues after getting the system up and running. It has run very well. Maintenance is also very good and support is also okay. They've got a lot of screens and other things which help. There are proactive error notifications so we can see what's happening. It has a nice front-end screen which monitors all the adapters. If there are any issues on anything, we can see them on one screen. 

We never have problems, as such, with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but we had issues which were related to the network or the machine or the database not working, getting full, or going down. But as far as the software is concerned, we haven't had any major issues. We have had minor issues which were immediately looked at and rectified by SEEBURGER.

We have a DR system for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's all saved if something goes wrong. We have multiple data centers so it's not been an issue. We have never had any major downtime.

The scalability depends on the price - which suite you're getting. At the moment, the version we are on, which is 6.52, is quite scalable because it has one adapter engine. 

Their architecture includes an admin server and an adapter server so you can just add more servers by adding licenses to it. If we want to scale up, we just a few more adapter engines into it; it's just adding a virtual server and more functions to it. It's not a big issue. Its scalability is very good at the moment. The software installation is not a big issue. So once you install it, you can just attach it to the existing architecture.

We have a lot of end-users sending files: FTP, SFTP, web services, or HTTP; and there are other services like AS2. We have about 75 to 80 customers and they interact with us with a file or data transfer.

It is our preferred tool at the moment. It's part of our strategy. I don't know about the future, but currently it is the only tool that we are using for interfacing with our various systems. We are still hoping to host most of the system. Most systems are migrating to the cloud, so we don't know yet. There it would an application-to-application connection, so maybe the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) role might be reduced, but currently it's used a lot.

One thing we need is more support. Sometimes we get stuck on the support because they've not got not many experienced people in the UK for the suite. We have modified SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) a lot to fit our organization. We have customized it. Sometimes we find it hard to get support from their side. Most of the time their help has been good from Germany because that's what they are based. They do help but we struggled before, at times.

The second-tier is needed if there is any problem where consultation is needed to go in-depth and see what the issue might be. We lack some good help from the other side on that level.

We had an issue where the customer wanted specific things and we couldn't do it.

We were using IBM Mercator which they now call WebSphere. The move to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) started because at that time the company wanted to check into systems which could support new interfaces. The system we had was an old system, so we needed to upgrade it. It was a choice the business had to go through but I wasn't involved in the team that handled the selection.

The setup is complex but we get the SEEBURGER implementers to come out, the consultants who do it the first time, whenever we have a major upgrade. Recently, we have tried to do all the service packs ourselves, but if there is a major upgrade - and most probably when we migrate to 6.7 - we require some consulting time from SEEBURGER because there might be a major change in the way some of the interfaces or communication might be working. That might be when we require a lot of consulting time from SEEBURGER, to understand the product and what features it has and what capabilities we can use.

Major upgrades are as demanding as an initial deployment, but if it's just a service pack, it's okay now. They have made it much simpler. Because we are on Active-Active, we can do patching while the service is still running.

Our initial deployment, back in 2009, took about two days. The software deployment only takes a day or so. But we also had to get all the hardware, the machines, and network service. Those took time. But the software deployment and configuration took just a day-and-a-half.

For that deployment, SEEBURGER people did not just do the deployment, they also worked on initial interface development for us. There were new mapping tools and we didn't have any experience with it, so they did that also. We had a contract with them for three months or so to have them do a lot of work for us. They had two or three consultants who basically converted a lot of the old IBM maps into the new SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS)-format maps.

At that time it was a big project because after installation they had to do the maps etc. Everything had been in IBM until that time. They had to replicate that into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

Now that we have more experience and good resources on our side, we do it ourselves. But at that time it took a total of six months, of which three months were for the initial consulting where we had two or three consultants. After that, it was only one consultant.

At that time it was a new thing for us so we were not in a rush. We installed and tested everything and we migrated one customer at a time. We had an old, IBM-based integration tool. The installation was done as a "blank canvas," and then we migrated our customers.

For a major upgrade, we set aside a period of seven days because we've got quite a few systems: a development system, a test system, a UAT or business integration system, and the production system. We go by step-by-step, so the whole process will take a week. On the first day, we'll do the development system and let it run for two days. Then we will upgrade the test system and let it run for two days to see if there are any issues. Then we will go to UAT, and after two days or so, the production system, which might be on a Sunday. It's an issue of timing because we have to get our change-control times allocated, especially when doing an upgrade to the production system.

We generally work with SEEBURGER. Once, when we had a lot of work to do, we did use a Polish company. I don't remember their name. We used them for a short period.

Finding SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) expertise is very hard. There isn't much SEEBURGER expertise in the UK. I don't think many major organizations are using it in the UK. I know they have very big customers in the US and Germany.

It's very hard to quantify ROI basically because we don't see the financial aspect it. Our job is to ensure that it is running and that we get the output and whatever is needed from it. But financially, if it was down, the impact might be humongous for our company.

The cost-based model is slightly different now in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They changed the licensing, based on adapters and other things. In the old style of licensing, the whole suite was one license, if I'm not mistaken. 

There is the license and then a run-cost.

But that's handled by my team leaders. I'm not into it involved in the cost and related issues.

They went through the selection process to see what interfacing applications were available in the market.

My advice would depend on the purpose you're considering SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for. If you are going to use it like we are using it, I would say it is a really good tool. If you have restrictions where you can't change the applications you have - you host a lot of third-party applications and you need to integrate the data between each of those applications, then SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is one of the best tools available. There are other tools, but this one is one of the best.

We may look to use the solution’s additional services such as its MFT (managed file transfer).

We have three integration specialists and one team leader for maintenance of the solution. We also have a design lead but he's not entirely dedicated to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS); he does design for other things as well.

We have seen version 6.7 and we want to migrate but we have not because migration is a big task for us. It might take some time.

We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as a service. While we were not really using their software, we might be using their software internally to provide a service. Effectively, we're using them as an integration partner.

We use SEEBURGER BIS for electronic data transmissions (EDI). It does a lot of work on our behalf in terms of the mapping and on some of the integrations which are required between us and third-parties. 

We have an integrated ERP system which talks directly to the SEEBURGER systems. Therefore, we don't necessarily have any manual interaction since this is a completely automated system which talks to the SEEBURGER back-end systems.

What would have been a manual process of transmitting data items around between us and third-parties has been automated. SEEBURGER BIS handles the automation and mapping side of the communications. The automation, along with the efficiency around time and cost, has improved our organization. Around 20,000 messages a month have been automated. These typically would be financial/order transactions and confirmations in invoicing that have been automated.

The automation is the most valuable feature. We have full EDI automation through SEEBURGER BIS, which has been the biggest win for us. It removes the complexity and makes the process straightforward.

We have additional ad hoc development costs, but those vary depending on if we're bringing on another third-party into our systems via the EDI integration. So, that's highly variable.

The speed of development needs improvement. If you acquire any customization, it can be a slightly slow process. I would like to see more flexibility around customizations. The time frame right now depends on the sophistication and customization, but we have to go through a process of getting them to develop, implement, and test it. This might take a couple of weeks. If it was a simpler system to customize, the time could probably be cut by half or down by even 25 percent of what it would normally take.

The stability is pretty good. It is rare that we have any stability issues.

The performance and operating efficiency are pretty good. We don't have any major issues in terms of operating efficiency, uptime, any failed transactions. If we do, they are generally not on SEEBURGER's end. They are usually on the other party's end. The service is pretty reliable.

We have about three people (an ICP analyst and two business analysts) who work on SEEBURGER BIS, but they don't work on it full-time.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues. Whenever we've added more components in or increased the volume of transactions, we have not had any issues.

There are about 30 organizations to whom we are connected via the SEEBURGER infrastructure.

We use it everyday, which will probably only increase. We don't have any concrete plans because this is dependent on our third-party customers, as well, and whether they have the infrastructures to support this type of development work. If they don't, then we won't. If they do, then we would. It also depends on return on investment. Some customers are more important than others.

We have had no problems with tech support. Their response time and knowledge of issues is good.

We were not previously using another solution. 

When SEEBURGER BIS came onboard, we changed our ERP systems so they were pretty much in parallel with that.

The initial setup was before my time.

People who worked on the initial setup told me that the initial setup was pretty slick.

We deal with SEEBURGER directly and they tend to do the development work on their systems for us. For recurring development work, they will do that on our behalf.

There are some third-parties involved who tend to be geographic specific and use different EDI formats. We are required in some cases when dealing with other parts of the world for EDI to go through a separate bureau. There's little we can do about that since it is just a data exchange format.

ROI comes back to automation. We are releasing people within our own organization to go and do more high value work. This is difficult to quantify for third-parties. Overall, it's an efficiency gain, which is the main driver behind return on investment.

The ROI for this is a very subjective thing to measure. We do have our own model for how we measure return on investment around things, like EDI transactions. However, it is not so simple model as providing a hard number.

Our licensing model is based on transactions. We have a base service contract which is priced against a volume of transactions and another volume of individual transactions, which are covered by one service agreement. Then, we have development services on top of that. Our annual spend is around £80,000. It's about mid-priced, as there are some cheaper alternatives out there and some more expensive ones. It's neither cheap nor expensive. It's somewhere in the middle.

Do your technical homework carefully to ensure that it's the right solution for you, because all solutions are slightly different in various different ways. It depends on your own back office systems and how your communications would work. Do your due diligence on technical requirements.

The biggest requirement that we have is resilience and robustness of the systems. If they fail for any reason, there is a monetary cost to us. The biggest lesson that we have learned: If you partner closely with them, maintain the stability. If there are any issues, understand what those issues will be before they occur and before they would be able to potentially cause any problems. The reliability, resilience, and robustness of SEEBURGER's services are the most important things.

We have had good service and uptime, generally. The resilience is pretty good. We have not experienced any problems.

SEEBURGER is established. They have a long standing presence within the market. They appear to have been there for a considerable period of time. If we had to change our systems, that would be a big upheaval in terms of the amount of work and testing that we would have to do. It's not something that we want. We would be unlikely to partner with a company if we felt that their future was uncertain.

I think it is a good thing that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D rather than promoting brand awareness. Some companies have a huge marketing spend compared with their R&D. If they can support it, then great. For SEEBURGER, the R&D is important because they need to be resilient and responsive. They need to be delivering what their services should be providing. It is crucial for us that the R&D spend continues to be sufficient.

We have no plans to expand into their API management, MFT, eInvoicing, or IIoT services at the moment.