What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite?

I've heard that the solution is cheaper when compared to other products in the market.

The pricing is about 7,000 euros for ten licenses. The startup costs may be a bit more, however, yearly, it may cost up to 50,000 euros on average.

I'm not familiar with the exact cost of the solution. I can't speak to how much we pay. That said, it's my understanding that it is reasonably priced. I'd rate it four out of five.

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.

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.

They have options for every budget. You can book Cloud Services, starting with a few hundred Euros, depending on what you want, or you can even purchase huge landscapes and operate them on your own or any deployment or operating model in between. The pricing is fair compared to others.

They need to be more competitively priced. When it comes to training, they need to lower their prices. It shouldn't be so specific. Maybe they should outsource training to another company. From what I can see, their training is pretty expensive, and they don't do anything for free. I don't expect it for free. However, if I have a quick question, and it takes five minutes to answer then don't charge me 30 minutes. Instead, let it go until you have 15 minutes worth of questions from me before you charge me the 30 minutes. It is a bit expensive. When I was looking at the product 12 years ago, they were talking about $500,000 for the product.

I had a problem at one time with their invoicing. I told them, then we worked on the process and improved it. They installed the connection between SAP and SEEBURGER BIS in Europe first. This was awhile ago. When I came along, I became involved in the project and started working with them. Every time that I made a request, the work was done well, but I was not receiving my invoices. I knew I had to pay for the work and was trying to find someone to send me the invoices or a report of what was being done. From that end, it was really not working. After a few years, I was complaining and not happy. At the end of the year, they would come with a long list of invoices to pay, which was really bad. So, I asked for a change. We worked on the process, and since five years ago, I have worked with SEEBURGER based in North America. Now, when I have a question, I know who to contact. They send me a report with invoices every month. They really reacted to my concern, and we improved the process. Since then, I have had no problem.

The solution provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow. SEEBURGER has a lot of offerings, but ours was completely on-prem. We paid one time. With our license, it doesn't matter how big or small your solution is. It doesn't matter how many servers you deploy the solution on, whether it's 10 virtual machines or 100 virtual machines. It is still covered in the license agreement. Our license is unlimited. That agreement was until version 6.5. But if we move to 6.7, I'm not sure if we will need to renew the agreement. We only pay for yearly maintenance and support.

It provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow. The flexibility there is good.

Price and licensing are comparable to other systems. It's well-priced and simple. It's not user-based or anything. It's just per seat, per system. So, it's pretty straight forward. Because it's per system, one system is enough. However, if you want to make it larger, then you can grow with it.

I know that we have a sweetheart deal. It is a little more expensive than Sterling. They have more control than they do with SI, I do a lot of contract work with Sterling. If you are looking at very standard workflow processes, you can go a little cheaper. But if you want something where you can completely design the system and offer a lot more automation, SEEBURGER is the way to go. SEEBURGER provides the flexibility to start small and pay as you grow especially with their new cloud offerings. That wasn't part of our process since we are on-premise. We are already pretty large, so there's not another room for us to go down and start up again.

The only thing that would be an improvement would be if they had a cost model whereby you could just pay for what you're actually using. Even if it were a minimum monthly charge that they offered, if you're not utilizing all of that then they should consider a lower tier. That way, they could attract more business. Aside from the standard usage fee there's an onboarding cost. I don't know if our prices were hardly negotiated or whether there is just a de facto price. But, in addition to the normal monthly, system-running costs, when you want to onboard a new trading partner, there's an onboarding cost. If you want to do any additional types of messages, there will be an implementation cost related to each message type. If you are onboarding like 10 or 20 trading partners at a time, they also have a project management cost for a defined project manager who's your main point of contact. That's how they make sure that everything gets done according to the time that they said that they were going to do it in. I've used third-party project management before for our ERP provider, and they've been shocking. So we tend to do a lot of project management ourselves. But SEEBURGER delivered. I was super-impressed.

We pay maintenance of between $75,000 and $100,000 per year. The costs are based on your original purchase solution.

There is a standard agreement for the messaging every month. But if we make a change request — a change to a mapping or something like that — then there is a fixed price per hour. We get the quotes for those types of things from the service desk. We would then approve that quote before they started any work.

On an annual basis, our support costs, which are based on the licensing, are about £120,000. As you increase the size of your system, the per-CPU usage goes up. You're licensed for CPU and any modules that you may require, such as API management. The maintenance cost, going forward, is 20 percent. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees, other than consultancy, which is usually required to install a new aspect of the system.

We pay per message we use. We spend about £19,000 a year with them. If we go over our band we obviously pay extra.

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.

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.

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.