SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

I have worked around 3.5 years with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite. Currently, I am working with WebMethods. Previously, I worked for approximately 4 years with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite.

We used SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite as a third-party vendor tool for B2B transaction flow.

The features of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite that I found most valuable are related to entity flow. We can find the entity flow to be very useful so we can grab the flow accordingly. There is no disturbance in the connections, and it is very clear to check the connection flow with applicable queues. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is the easiest way to understand the application. I have also worked on the cloud services where SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is moving to cloud. The mapping part and connection setup are in the cloud itself.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite supports specific customer needs by displaying partner certifications such as AS2 and SFTP, and inbound flow from end-to-end flow such as SAP to partner and partner to SAP connection setup and total entity setup. For main support in development work and AMS support, I have been resolving errors in mappings and connection glitches. For example, if values are not getting populated in EDI files, we need to check and find the root cause in material numbers or quantities in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite mappings.

The features of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite that I found most valuable are related to entity flow. We can find the entity flow to be very useful so we can grab the flow accordingly. There is no disturbance in the connections, and it is very clear to check the connection flow with applicable queues. When comparing to other applications, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is the easiest way to understand the application. I have also worked on the cloud services where SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is moving to cloud. I have worked on cloud services where the mapping part is in the cloud itself, along with the connection setup.

Regarding areas of improvement for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite, the cloud functionality needs enhancement. The cloud interface is currently too cluttered, especially when creating new transactions from scratch or performing search queries. When searching for partner flow or B2B inbound and outbound processes, the search functionality is cumbersome and needs improvement.

Regarding downtime, during patching or network maintenance, the IP address does not get refreshed automatically. This requires restarting the application to update the IP address, which is an issue from the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite vendor side.

The deployment time for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite depends on the enhancement requirements from users or partners. For simple maps such as 824s and 997s, we can complete deployment in 2 to 3 weeks. For ASNs and invoices, we need to be more careful, implement hypercare, and understand partner requirements and business justifications before estimating the deployment time.

I would rate the stability of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite as 9 out of 10. The system works fine unless there is network maintenance, which can cause downtime.

I would rate the scalability of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite as 9 out of 10. The scalability depends primarily on the mapping itself, as the connection and file flow are in the cloud. It depends on mapping coding, which uses its own language. Understanding the queries and logic makes it easier to modify and adapt to partner specifications.

I would rate my experience with the technical support of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite as 10 out of 10. I gained substantial knowledge from SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite.

Positive

The initial setup of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is relatively easy. With hands-on experience, the installation process is straightforward. I would rate the initial setup difficulty as 8 out of 10.

Regarding the pricing of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite, I would rate it as 7 out of 10.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite handles various data formats for customers by offering ANSI X12, EDIFACT, VDA, and ODETTE. We use both SFTP and non-SFTP paths. EDIFACT is most commonly used, including formats such as 850, 856, 860, and 862 for inventory files, order changes, purchase orders, and dispatch advice.

I worked with over 100 customers and suppliers, including critical banking partners with high priorities. Extra care must be taken when checking mappings or connections for these partners, as any mistakes could lead to significant escalations.

My overall rating for SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is 10 out of 10.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is primarily used as a database tool for data conversion and connecting with third-party partners. I utilize it for communication with internal systems as well as partners, making data conversions straightforward.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is simple to use and straightforward. It comes pre-loaded with solutions, meaning it is ready to use without requiring significant development. Minimal knowledge is needed to operate it effectively, and guidance can help users understand it further. Additionally, the support provided is very good, assisting in the resolution of any difficulties encountered.

Overall, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is a robust and standard product. However, providing more training materials, especially when new products are released, would be beneficial. Acquiring training documents on a public domain for SEEBURGER is challenging, so making these more accessible would be helpful.

I have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite for the past nine months. Previously, I used it for five to six years.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is a very stable product, and I haven't noticed any significant drawbacks. However, I'm currently facing an issue with version 6.7 after updating the certificates, which may require opening a support ticket to resolve.

There are no issues with the scalability of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite; it can easily scale up or down.

The support provided by SEEBURGER is excellent. They assist us in resolving any difficulties, thanks to the already built solutions they offer.

Positive

I haven't worked on the installation part myself. Most of the time, we coordinate with the SEEBURGER team, who helps us with the setup.

I would recommend SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite to others, depending on their company architecture and business needs. More training materials on a public domain would be beneficial, especially for new users. Overall, I would rate SEEBURGER a strong eight out of ten.

The solution is used for B2B integrations and receiving messages securely over the internet.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is a highly stable solution that offers rich features for our B2B integration.

The solution's documentation is not up to the mark and needs to be improved.

I have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite for 12 years.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

The solution will scale out automatically, but there are some issues with scaling in. Around 100 users are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite in our organization.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is neither easy nor difficult. You need to have knowledge and experience in order to do it.

The solution's initial deployment would take two to three days.

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

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

The solution's documentation is really poor, and we need to rely on their consultants. You can't read the documents and do the setup yourself. You need someone from SEEBURGER to deploy the solution in the cloud in two to three days. Otherwise, it would take weeks.

Other products have very good documentation, and you can follow the steps just by reading the document. However, that's not the case with SEEBURGER. Their document is not up to the mark, and you need to rely on their consultant or someone from SEEBURGER to sit next to you or be available to do the setup, especially when it comes to deployment on the cloud.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution basically for the integration, mostly EDI, and sometimes API. 

The documents would come out of SAP and then go to SEEBURGER, get transformed, and then be sent to the trading partner. 70% or 80% of the business would be this, and 20% is on the API side where we have very high demands from the logistics side of the business.

Whatever it is I need, I have. for example, end-to-end integration, data mapping, communication protocols, and integration with the SAP module. Everything is good with SEEBURGER.

It's a stable product.

We haven't had any issues with scaling.

Technical support is responsive. 

At this moment, everything is working fine. When we are talking to them, when we are trying to bring all this mapping in-house, right now, SEEBURGER is doing everything for us. 

However, when we are thinking of going onto the cloud, so they are not using any of AWS or Azure which are more stable. They have their own private cloud. That's the reason we did not go ahead with managing everything by ourselves or moving into the cloud. They said that they're going to be doing it within the next two years, having access to Azure and AWS. That would be something we would like to see.

I've been using the solution for more than 15 years. 

The stability is good. For example, it is far more cost-effective than OpenText and better, far more reliable, and has very high availability. It's good overall. 

The fact that it is on-premises does not affect its scalability. For us, it works quite well and meets our needs. We have 20 to 25 users on the product right now. Mostly, they are consultants. It's used on a daily basis. 

Technical support has been great. They resolve our issues very fast. We are satisfied with the level of support we get. They are very responsive.

Positive

I'm also familiar with OpenText. 

OpenText is priced higher than SEEBURGER. It's why we were trying to find out a different provider, however, it's a very big task as we have a lot of trading partners on OpenText and it will be a big challenge to move away from that provider. Initially, we were thinking of Mulesoft, however, when I talked to my peers I found that Mulesoft gets costly once you start implementing it. Right now, talks are going on as to how to get rid of OpenText, and whether we move everything over to SEEBURGER. OpenText's responsiveness to the customer service team is also not at par with SEEBURGER. I would rate them at around 2.5 out of five. 

Also, there are a lot of hidden areas where we'll have questions, and they're not providing answers. Maybe they're reluctant to provide answers about the cost or things like that. The transparency is less when you compare it with SEEBURGER. We would like to see, for example, more documentation in regards to some areas of OpenText to understand some areas of the product a little bit better.

We set up the solution 15 years ago. It was so long ago, that I can't recall if it was easy or difficult or what was involved in the process. 

A third party assisted in the initial setup.

I can't speak to the exact ROI. The head of the EDI has all this information. I do not have this information.

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'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. I've been very happy with its capabilities. 

On-premises

We primarily use the solution for content conversion and file transfers. 

There are no programming skills needed. It's easy to configure. 

The features are great. They have a lot of them.

The solution can scale.

It is stable and reliable. We have not had any issues.

Technical support has been great so far.

I find the solution quite confusing to use, especially when looking at the tree structure. I am having trouble with the settings and finding what I need. They are confusing. 

I just started using the solution. We started using it about a month or so ago. 

The solution is stable. We've had no issues so far. I'd rate it eight out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We have less than ten users on the solution right now. We have one admin and an engineer and then a few other users. The scalability is good. There are so many features you can access. I'd rate it eight out of ten.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

I did not install the solution myself. I wasn't a part of the deployment. 

We have a few different use cases, and we have about three people that can maintain the solution to facilitate that.

Our IT department installed the solution. It took them a couple of hours to implement the solution. We did not have any implementors assist us. It was done in-house. 

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 a customer and end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution. It's been updated. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It offers very good features.

On-premises

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.

On-premises

We are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for any kind of integration, but mainly in the areas of B2B, A2A and API, and even data-lake related topics. We do not have any limitations in using it, so if a special integration demand arises outside the integration patterns described, we can be sure that it is always possible.

It's a hybrid. Some parts are on-premises and other parts in the SEEBURGER Cloud.

On the one hand, when we are talking about classic integration like EDI, we have countries in which we do a high percentrage of our revenue with B2B. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides significant value in handling such things in an automated way. All the automation features are quite important. But even if partners ask us to provide integration capabilities, we are able to meet their demands. When customers ask us, we don't generally need to decline.

With the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we can deal with each and every demand, whether it is EDI, or the customer or partner wants to have another type of interface with no direct relation to EDI, or even modern approaches like APIs. When a customer or partner asks us to provide an API on their side, while our internal components are not API-ready, the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can make them API-ready. Think of an SAP IDoc. You can take it, you can translate it to an API-related data format, and communicate with an API. To the outside, no one would recognize that this is coming from an old-fashioned IDoc.

The solution also helps us automate processes completely. All of the processes inside SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) are made for doing a concept, doing a setup, doing a test and then, usually, you no longer have to touch them. That means it's fully automated, either by a task scheduler, or even better, by events. Whenever someone from the outside is sending data, it could be fully and automatically booked in the remote system. Or when we're picking up a mailbox, it is done with a scheduled job within the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), and the data will be processed completely without touching it.

The automation has definitely helped to reduce our costs. For example, in the automation of interfaces, EDI is the biggest portion. It's a significant KPI in the majority of the countries in which OSRAM, our company, is working. Sales automation quota is usually part of the management reporting and should indicate how many interfaces and how many documents can be booked completely without touching them, and as a result, free up resources to support business partners more. Some years ago, a calculation said, that a person in a customer service center could handle between 60,000 up to 100,000 sales orders per year, when keying them in manually. With data-driven sales automation you can free people, to care about more individual requests, and generate leads more effectively than ever before.

It also helps us to keep up to date on regulatory requirements, from two angles. On the one hand, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has an evergreen approach, so you do not really need to do updates. You do service packs or hotfixes all the time so you do not have to do a huge update project. Service packs also come with new functionality. For example, some years ago, OFTP1 over dial-up lines was replaced by OFTP2 over IP-based lines or internet traffic. This was then the default that came with one of the next service packs. On top of that, SEEBURGER is asking their customers what they need. It is not only about what SEEBURGER thinks the customer needs. You can give them input. If you tell them that new technology might come up, they see if it can be a part of the next service pack.

Another benefit is that it has helped to decrease time to market in our business. Whenever we receive a request from our project teams, usually within a few minutes we can set up an API. When we receive a request, we schedule it, of course, because our calendars are full of topics, but if you want to create an interface like an API, it can be completely done within a few minutes.

One of the most valuable features is the option to have all integration patterns constantly updated in one platform. That is the main strength I see in using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It means I can use a very old-fashioned integration pattern, combined with a very modern integration pattern. There are no limitations in terms of combining components because all the components simply fit together.

SEEBURGER's support for multiple integration patterns makes it the best choice. I know many integration solutions, but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is the only one with such a huge catalog of options that you can use out-of-the-box and use as plug-and-play.

All the topics we've identified have been placed on the SEEBURGER roadmap already. Our company is part of the SEEBURGER customer advisory board where some customers have been asked to give feedback. We give very open feedback to SEEBURGER, telling them what is not working properly. And all of our topics are already on the roadmap. They are close to their customers and try to fulfill their needs. Whatever needs to be improved will be there within one of the next service packs.

Among the things we have requested are improvements in the user interface and improvements that would be implemented by completely new modules or improvements in their Cloud Services. For example, because we are a global-facing company, we've recognized that we not only need some well-known e-invoicing mechanisms available over the SEEBURGER Cloud, but we need many. Even if there are smaller ones which are not well-known, the expectation is that SEEBURGER can provide them to us. SEEBURGER responded to that demand and provided services for countries where they've not had this before. The feedback on usability topics has been converted by SEEBURGER into improvements. We see them coming, step-wise, with each and every service pack.

We have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for nearly 20 years.

The stability depends on what you need. We are operating a module so called Active-Active, together with the DataStore. The Active-Active component takes care of allowing multiple machines to work as a type of cluster and they can replace each other. If you have multiple machines or multiple nodes on which Active-Active is running, you can distribute the traffic to all of them. Say you have two machines with the Active-Active extension, and you have to restart one because of operating system updates. The other machine can completely take over.

The interesting thing is that this is done based on the transaction level of your processing. While operating system-based mirroring or database or storage-based mirroring are always done on a purely technical level, with the SEEBURGER Active-Active, a transaction coming in will be registered initially on all nodes. If one node goes down while your file or data is being processed, the other side can make use of the data and continue processing. This way, you can have up to almost 100 percent uptime.

You can even do SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) updates. You can take one site offline, do a service pack update, hotfixes, or configuration changes, and that newer version with the new service pack will be compatible to continue processing with the other node. You can bring it up, wait until processing is distributed to both sides again, and do the service pack update on the other side. You can ensure that you have zero downtime.

I would say the scalability is unlimited because you can add additional nodes in an unlimited way. You have several topics where you can make use of the scalability of the solution. You might have multiple nodes where you are distributing the same activity to multiple computers or VM guest systems. That way, you increase the power of the whole system.

You can even split instances. For example, I want to split user activities done over the front end or user portal, like using an API catalog, from the processing activities, such as translating a file or communicating a file to SAP or to an external partner. That enables me to increase the power for the processing when I do not need additional power for the users. There are multiple modules, the process engine, Adapter Engine, and DataStore, and you can distribute them to several machines and increase them in an unlimited way. What we've heard a few years ago is, that SEEBURGER has tested with 250 instances, meaning there were 250 computers working as one or system, and that might not be the latest test.

We have 300 to 350 people working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but from different areas. We have end-users using it for business monitoring checking the messages exchanged with their partners. It could be a sales person who wants to see which messages have been sent by his customer. We also have developers on the platform developing APIs, as well as the people developing mappings for the B2B activities. There are also administrators, who are mainly part of the department I'm working in. We enable people to make use of integration capabilities. The user interface has been improved drastically over the last few years, and that means they do not always have to ask us, "Can you do this for me?" or "Can you search that for me?" We give them an account and then they can go in and gather the information on their own.

In terms of future-proofing our business, we see that SEEBURGER is fast enough that even our architects receive a satisfying answer. Whenever we ask about, for example, "Can you deal with Docker containers?" or "Can you do API management?" or "Can you do data ingestion for data lake? they have a solution ready. We know that SEEBURGER has invested a lot of effort into research and development. It is not only that they follow what the customers are doing and requesting, but they even prepare for the future. That's interesting for us, because for some topics I was not even aware that SEEBURGER is dealing with that, like Docker or Kubernetes.

If SEEBURGER sees something that is required, things which are not necessarily related to integration, like running a system on a Docker container, or Active-Active, SEEBURGER provides such options to make the customer happy and to ensure that their product is running properly. They make sure they can handle future demands. They do everything to ensure that they are ready for the future.

Even in regard to security, for example, we see that they avoid having security issues or running into issues with outdated software because, with the service packs, they always prepare for future software for new Java versions, or to be ready for new operating systems or new database versions. They always have a roadmap to ensure that there's nothing we can complain about.

We have a 24/7 maintenance and support contract with SEEBURGER, which includes software updates as well as technical support. They take care of the documentation that describes what our company is doing with SEEBURGER and that it is always up to date. Even if the named supporters assigned to our account are not there because I call support on the weekend or at night, another support contact is able to quickly check what our landscape looks and what we are doing.

Their support activities are very precise. A tool they've integrated in their Landscape Manager allows us to automatically provide all that required data to SEEBURGER in one shot. The Landscape Manager acts without any database and without any interdependency with the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself. So even if our BIS system has issues, they can do an analysis immediately. The Landscape Manager, with the option to create a support case, is collecting all that information and provides it in the required format to SEEBURGER. Usually, within a short time frame, you have a qualified answer about what is wrong. The knowledge and experience of all their support staff have increased drastically over the last years. Even if there is an issue at night, the chance is nearly 100 percent that a support person can help us immediately.

When we started with SEEBURGER, we used a version called SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Version 5. The setup for that was a little bit complicated. 

With the newer versions, like 6.7, it is easy because they guide you with a lot of wizards and good documentation. If you do a setup now, you can use the BIS Landscape Manager, which is a tool with which you can control your complete landscape. You might have several components inside such a BIS environment. You might add another server, for example, to handle demand. The Landscape Manager is a tool that gives you a full overview of your landscape. From there, you can set up new components. If you book something in addition, you can add it from there. You can do service pack updates. You can install hotfixes from there and all potential third-party components you might need. For example, you can install components to connect between SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and SAP. You can even handle licensing topics over the Landscape Manager. This was a significant improvement, over the years, because it helps us to fully automate even the basic administration, when we are not thinking about interfaces concretely.

We started at a point, 20 years ago, when some of the mechanisms were not there. Now, when you start with SEEBURGER, if you have a clear idea about what you want to do, the initial setup could be done within less than one hour, because of their guided approach. That includes installing the system base with all its components and even deploying a standard solution which provides a lot of integration functionality on more of an abstract level. That way, you do not have to deal with technical details. You just input whatever is required to run your interface, but you do not have to deal with any technical topics.

In general, we have seen ROI, because we have done a lot of consolidation over the last few years and avoided the need for other solutions by using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as our central integration platform. Over the years, we've migrated around 40 to 45 decentralized integration solutions and saved a lot of money and reduced complexity. We have even improved the services we can provide to our partners because they do not necessarily have to deal in a different way in different regions. They always have the choice based on same service offering in each region where OSRAM is active.

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.

Around one and a half years ago, we evaluated other solutions around the time we introduced the API management within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We recognized that SEEBURGER is the only one which provides such a wide spectrum of functionality, all from one vendor, without adding modules from a third party. All the others we've had an eye on say, "Yeah, we can add this or you can download that plug-in from this company." This is not the case with SEEBURGER. You can have all these components from one vendor, which helps avoid running into trouble because of a vendor saying, "I'm not responsible." That is the biggest strength of SEEBURGER, beside their strong interest in OSRAM. 

They've really spent a lot of time giving us all the answers to all the topics we've been interested in. Once we introduced the API management, even the SEEBURGER CTO spent time aligning with us on what the API management roadmap looks like at SEEBURGER, to ensure that my management could support the decision, together with me, to use SEEBURGER for API management. We introduced it and we are happy with it. We see that what SEEBURGER promised us is now available in the current versions.

Ask SEEBURGER to provide you with information, especially around your demand or requirement concepts, and then follow up with SEEBURGER on a proof of concept. SEEBURGER is quite open to doing proofs of concept with customers, so that the customer knows, 100 percent, that this is the solution that can fulfill their needs. There are multiple options to see what they are doing, but mainly start with a request for information or with a workshop or a proof of concept and find out if SEEBURGER is the right software. In my opinion it is a Yes. Then you can align with them on the next steps. For example, you can decide if the right deployment model for you is in the cloud or if it is on-premises or something in between. SEEBURGER Cloud Services are using exactly the same software you would use to operate your system on-premises. There is no difference and that's a strength, because as more people are using the same software and participate in improving it, the better the quality will be.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) itself is just transporting data. It is not a data warehouse or business system. But it is heavily supporting real-time traffic. The solution has been supporting API for a few years, and with API you can do real-time calls. It could be that a customer using Salesforce requests the status of an order they have placed with us. They can click in Salesforce and, in real-time, within a few milliseconds, Salesforce is asking SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to extract that information from SAP and to bring it back to the customer within the front end. Within a few milliseconds, the customer can retrieve the latest status. With this up-to-date information, the customer can plan, update and trigger follow-up processes that move his business forward.

Another example is that we have a product catalog which provides data to one of our services where a customer can check for his type of car and the age of his car, and can find a recommendation for the right light bulb. This is done with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) API management, which is embedded in their Business Integration Suite. Within milliseconds, we provide the information about which light bulbs are the right ones for that specific car, send it back to the internet page, and serve the user with that information. Customers can make the right purchase decision in the shortest possible time. Synchronous, asynchronous, near-time and real-time - everything is possible with the same platform. It's like a toolbox.

I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10. Whenever I've had any concerns or was not happy with something, SEEBURGER improved things immediately. There's nothing to complain about.

On-premises

My organization is on the retail side, so it has been more beneficial on the insurance side of the business because it has allowed them the freedom to do a few more things. It helped them connect to private eyewear doctors so they could upload their insurance forms. Previously, we had to babysit our old software at the end of the month to make sure that files wouldn't get blown up because of their size. Whereas, SEEBURGER BIS doesn't seem to have an issue with this, which saves us time.

The solution helps us automate processes, more on the insurance side. Where they used to have to babysit monthly files, because of size, they don't have to do that with SEEBURGER BIS. They just run the monthly process. Files get collected, translated, and sent to the proper systems, so the babysitting is gone.

It helps keep us up-to-date on regulatory requirements.

I like that you can search documents.

This solution is a little more straightforward versus my old mapper, IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. I can point, click, and link one data field to another, then it will map. With my old mapper, I had to save the data, then read all the records of the table or file before processing the conversion. So, I had to read the data pile, score all the data, and then convert. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I can just take the data and map it to a field, which is more straightforward and robust.

Data mapping is faster in SEEBURGER BIS than IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. It is easier to use the tools in SEEBURGER BIS to debug maps than it is in Sterling B2B Integrator, which has its glitches. For example, I have a special character in the data field. Data will fail when mapping this special character with Sterling, then I have to go in and fix it. Whereas, with SEEBURGER BIS, I don't have this issue.

I find it simple to do my mapping. Today, I have that it is pretty simple to set up trading partners.

The West Coast was thinking that SEEBURGER BIS would convert my maps, then they would own the process. The problem: There are times that we have to change dates or something in the map to facilitate what the business is looking to do for a partner. So, it turned out after much bellyaching on my part that this couldn't be done. So, I don't know if we can have a cloud solution and still own the maps. I think they are going towards that direction. We are looking to possibly have them host the server, but then the fees will go up.

I have been using it for slightly over a year. I had some informal/formal training on SEEBURGER BIS.

Our team in California has been using it for three to four years. 

I don't think since I have been involved with SEEBURGER BIS that it has been down. We do have a backup. So, if one server goes down, then it kicks over.

On the technical side, there are five or six users.

We have plans to increase usage of SEEBURGER BIS in the future. The retail side of the business is open to utilizing the solution more. Also, as the insurance business grows, they will definitely be using it.

The technical support is excellent. I reach out to the service desk in Germany and normally get a reply within a day. They are able to get to the root cause of an issue and resolve it. 

I have a consultant in Phoenix, Arizona, who is assigned to our account, and it's usually within the day I get an answer from them.

Right now, we use IBM Sterling B2B Integrator as our EDI platform and are converting over to SEEBURGER BIS. The California team has probably done 85 percent of their conversions. So, they are pretty much up and running. At this point, I have converted roughly 95 of my maps over to SEEBURGER BIS, but none are in production. COVID-19 took a big hit on us, which kind of slowed us down.

We were also using Connect Enterprise, which is another IBM product. Connect Enterprise had reached the end of its life and IBM was no longer supporting it. In addition, it seemed like Connect Enterprise didn't have the capability to handle the file sizes that the insurance side of the business was pushing through.

We switched to SEEBURGER BIS because we want an all-in-one solution for multiple products.

The initial setup was straightforward. A person whom I work with, and is not very technical, found the setup complex, as there are a lot of steps. I put down the steps for her, and she was like, "Oh yeah, this is pretty easy". You just got to follow the guidelines.

I have converted 95 maps. I probably have another 100 to 200 more to go. I use the mapping tool every day. 

We had someone from SEEBURGER come out and show us the mapper in November and February. 

SEEBURGER came in to install it. There were probably three or four people involved from the SEEBURGER side along with two people from our California team.

Today, the California team is going to show me how to install a new AS2 certificate.

This is less babysitting. In the amount of downtime, we are probably saving money, which is a big thing.

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. 

When they decided not to move forward with anything to replace IBM Connect Enterprise, I looked for solutions that would benefit our eyewear side of the business. We wanted to go with the version of SEEBURGER BIS that runs on SAP PO, but we were overruled. The organization purchased SEEBURGER BIS and wanted us to use that version too.

I have always liked the product. I looked at the SEEBURGER BIS product almost 12 years ago. However, because of the price, it was shot down.

Understand the cost factor. Have someone from SEEBURGER help you, though this will add to your costs. 

It is fairly simple to pick up as you start using it. Definitely have SEEBURGER train you, if you are not already familiar with the product.

The mapping is easy, but it still takes time to learn.

Because of COVID-19 and the impact on the businesses worldwide, some monies from our budget have been cut. However, I think we are looking to go to 6.7 either the first or second quarter of next year. On the insurance side, with 6.7, they can do a few more things a bit easier because of some of the APIs that can be incorporated. I also think that the footprint of the software is smaller. Less storage is less money that we need to spend on storage. We are also looking at the possibility of having the solution stored on a cloud. We haven't gotten that deep into discussions yet.

Sitting around with SEEBURGER at a seminar in December and discussing their project plan for the future, I think this product is the way to go.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I will probably go up further with my rating as I learn more of its capabilities.

On-premises

We primarily use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for application-to-application integration and for integration with external partners. We have the entire SEEBURGER suite deployed in our external VLANs, and it's primarily responsible for communicating with internal systems as well as external partners. Once we communicate with them, we exchange EDI messages, XML messages, and APIs, and then we convert them to the appropriate ERP format. We have SAP as our ERP as well as IMPulse, and other internal applications. We can merge the data into appropriate format, and then we forward it to the corresponding applications, downstream.

It's completely on-prem. Back in the day, when we started the alliance with SEEBURGER, we bought their entire product and everything was installed on-prem. All our solutions are custom-built by us, as part of our business process needs.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), as an application within Ingram Micro, contributes around 30 percent of the revenue. We have different XML channels—we have Apogee and we have TIBCO as a middleware for XML and APIs. But we use SEEBURGER for XML as well as EDI. SEEBURGER is the only EDI middleware that we have in Ingram Micro for retail and logistics, and EDI comprises $16 or $17 billion in revenue per year.

The solution provides a unified platform without needing to add third-party solutions. It makes things easy and convenient because the development that we do is within the product itself. The entire suite for development is limited and focused only within SEEBURGER products. We know that if any upgrades are causing a bug, they are not because of any third-party software that we installed. That helps us greatly in terms of operations because we are in control. We know that there's only a single point of contact if something breaks down. We don't have to run around or read through blogs. We know that SEEBURGER is the only company that can answer the question. And the response from them, while it's not that fast, is okay. They're doing a good job.

The SEEBURGER Mapping Designer is very comfortable and easy to use. We have also worked with the SEEBURGER Process Designer, and that is also a very easy Eclipse plug-in-based utility that you can use to define your own BPELs. Those are the two most useful functionalities.

We also use the Adapter Engine and the process engine. The Adapter Engine is primarily hosting all the services responsible for communication. We have different adapters for different protocols—HTTP, AS2, SFTP, FTPS, JMS, and all the native adapters that we have.

The process engine is responsible for data orchestration. It is a central repository where your process is deployed and all your BPELs are deployed. As you receive files, a process is initiated in the process engine which executes your business workflow, and it uses adapter engines whilst executing and completing the process.

The entire framework is something that is very easy to use, easy to set up, and extremely straightforward. Once you develop a process and once you get it deployed within the process engine, with the latest 6.52 features, the processing engine is actually smart enough to make a decision as to which process engine has less load, and it can exchange messages with that process engine.

Another functionality is called Move-To-Production. It actually validates everything before it completes the movement from QA to the production system. From a compliance perspective, that helps us during audits. We know at any given point of time what was changed, when it was changed, who changed it and the ticket reference number associated with that change.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) also has a feature called Message Tracking. Message Tracking is used by the support team and by the business to know the status of transactions of different partners. If you have an order number from the partner, you can actually key it into the Message Tracking portal and it will give you the details corresponding to that order number.

And then there is a module within Message Tracking, an extended message search, that gives you the flexibility of searching for wildcard characters. For instance, if you have an order that has been shipped to James Snow, using the extended message search you can find all the orders, regardless of which partner is involved, that have been shipped to James Snow. It does help us in that way.

All of these features are extremely beneficial.

There are a lot of things that can be improved. One would be integration of the different products into one. Today they have their API management tool, they have the SEEBURGER legacy front end, and the entire BIS. In the BIS, if I want to have some API functionalities, that is a separate tool. The integration between the API tool and the BIS is not that straightforward. If they were to combine these tools and give us one suite, that would be helpful. Today I have a lot of partners onboard. I have something like 50,000 partners doing API transactions. If I want to introduce a new tool for API management, I have to do a lot of workarounds. But if it were integrated well within the existing suite, it could be straightforward for me. I would not have to reach out to all those partners and request that they change something. I could deal with that internally, within the suite itself. 

There are a few capabilities that have come out a little late. TIBCO introduced its container edition way back. It's been on the market for three or four. SEEBURGER is only in the initial phase of 6.7. If SEEBURGER could come up with and adopt changes really quickly, that would be better.

Their ability to future proof our business really depends on what sort of development they do and how fast they adopt changes. They are a little slow in releasing newer features. We are hopeful that SEEBURGER will change their internal processes to adopt changes a little quicker.

The company has been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for 11 years and I've been using it for around nine years.

It's quite robust. We haven't seen any memory leaks or performance impact with the product. We assess the system and continuously monitor the JVM and the application for performance. When we think that there's a need, we scale out. But if the load remains constant, there is no question about the performance or the robustness of the tool.

Scalability is a little challenging because of the way we have set up the solution. Back in the day, it did not support Active-Active, which would give you the flexibility of managing your transactions across process engines. If you receive a file and it's executing within a process engine, it's very isolated to that process engine. If the process engine is loaded up with thousands or maybe millions of records, it will wait until it all gets flushed out and then start processing the next batch. But with Active-Active, there is the flexibility where it can share the workload across different process engines, and this now comes natively within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). 

Initially, we did not have that, but have with recent in-house development we have that functionality. We adjusted our architecture in a way that we leveraged load balancing and internal configuration for Active-Active, but it's not SEEBURGER Active-Active. Now, it can actually balance the load across different parallel instances. But having said that, every instance is still a singleton instance. It cannot share the load with any other process engine.

But moving to version 6.7, I think scaling will be a lot easier and it will be on-the-fly. But scalability, for us, has been kind of challenging because we did not move to Active-Active.

Our business is contacting resellers and other partners and we do onboard a lot of partners on a weekly basis. The business is something that is growing.

As for the number of users, it is different for the different components. There are 200 business users who go into Message Tracking and check the status of their transactions, download or review a file, or review a process and whether it ended properly or not. We also have 40 developers working on different parts of development in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). There are another 10 users from our support team.

SEEBURGER support is doing a decent job. We are not using any of their standard solutions. All the solutions we have at Ingram Micro are customized. So they usually take a little longer to respond back because they do not know what sort of development happens within Ingram Micro. If there is any bug in a specific process, they definitely don't know about that process because it has been developed and customized for Ingram. So they usually take a little bit longer in responding, but the majority of the time they do a fair job there.

Before SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) we were running more than two applications to support the entire external partner communication. The partner connectivity gateway had something named Cyclone which was used for communicating with external partners. And then we used Gentran, an IBM mainframe product, to take care of conversion. When we put in the SEEBURGER solution, we replaced Cyclone and Gentran with just the one product. Recently, we have migrated a lot of other legacy softwares to SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) as well.

One of the reasons we switched was that development was easy in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Second, the old system was going out-of-support and we needed some solid middleware that could take care of all the existing workflows for us. We found the SEEBURGER solution to be very easy and straightforward, so we went ahead with it. The third reason we went with it was support. We did not have premium support with the old application that we were using. Familiarity with the tool also played a part. We started our SEEBURGER journey in 2008, so our team was very familiar with the tool. Everyone had good hands-on with the development and we were pretty comfortable in that area. So we proceeded with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). When you have a familiar tool and you know that the tool is good in terms of performance, that it is robust and reliable, you definitely have that choice in your mind when you propose a solution.

The initial setup was complex because we were migrating from multiple solutions.

In general, the setup doesn't take that much time. It's straightforward. They introduced Deployment Manager a couple of years ago and Move-To-Production was introduced about four or five years ago. But we have had this tool from 2008 and back then there were challenges in deployment. It was time-consuming and more manual. But now, with recent changes, deployment is straightforward.

The amount of time it would take nowadays would depend on what type of deployment we are talking about. There are different components. One of  them is map deployment and that doesn't take more than a couple of minutes. The deployment for process is less than a minute, but it depends if you are changing the entire form of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). In that case it might take like more than a minute. But if it is a lightweight project that doesn't touch the built-in forms, it should take less than a minute.

But to deploy the entire suite would take time because you have to have a database before you go ahead with the deployment. You need to allocate the schema for the specific instance and then you need to start working. If you have the database ready, and you have the network setup between the database and the firewall in place, I don't think it would take more than 30 minutes to deploy a new SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) instance.

It could be handled by a person. But usually, when you talk about an enterprise, there are different teams for handling the database and the application. If the database and the operating system and the network and firewalls are ready, I can go in as a SEEBURGER expert and SME, and install their product. As part of the installation process, it will ask if it is for a process engine or for Adapter Engine and what the database is. It will ask what port it's listening on, as well as what the service name is, etc.

Because everything is on-prem, we take care of the deployment. SEEBURGER is not involved in anything. They just release regular patches and upgrades to the system. We download the patches and software from their website and we install it. We upgrade the system and we manage the entire SEEBURGER suite in Ingram.

They are only responsible for severity tickets. We have a premium-level agreement with them for support, just in case we have a production issue and we are not able to figure things out. We can raise a "critical" and then they join a call or discuss resolutions via email. That is the only place where SEEBURGER is actually involved.

SEEBURGER is moving to a more containerized architecture with Kafka. So if you want to move to a more containerized framework, that is with version 6.7. If we move to 6.7, that is when we might involve the vendor to lay down the design and provide the integration strategies.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, there are six people involved, five working from India. I'm the one in the U.S.

I don't have exact numbers, but the return on investment is pretty good, given that it generates 30 percent of our revenue—around $16 billion—and we only pay for support for the year. The ROI is pretty good.

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.

We do have TIBCO, which we were using back in the day when we purchased the SEEBURGER solution, but it is limited to being used for internal communication, not to communicate with external partners. One of the reasons is that it was costly. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is way cheaper in terms of maintenance and support when compared to TIBCO.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using the solution is that you shouldn't go too customized. We in Ingram have such a customized solution that sometimes even the vendor is clueless about what is happening in the system. They need to get our custom process, look it up in their local machine to see what we have done, and then propose a solution. So limit your customized solutions and practices. Because back in the day, if we updated 10,000 partner agreements or 10,000 partner configurations, we would go into the solution's backend database and update it. But in the long run, that might not be good because when you do interactions with the database directly, they may not be compliant. Going about it the standard way, through the SEEBURGER tool, it validates all the values for compliance. For example, it checks that this field has to be this many characters, or maybe this particular activity is a mandatory activity. But when directly updating the database, it can break.

In terms of advice, the online forum and documentation are very limited. That is something that you need to be aware of. If you look at other vendors like IBM Sterling B2B Integrator or TIBCO, the forums are pretty active and all the documentation is available on the internet. But if you try to look up development in SEEBURGER, you will hardly find any videos or documentation. We know the solution and we develop it because it's been inherited in our company from 2008. The team that initially set it up transferred all the knowledge to us and we are taking the legacy forward. But if someone has to buy SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), they will need the vendor's help to develop in it because they will not see anything online.

There are discussions going on about the possibility of our moving to version 6.7, but that probably won't happen until next year or the year after. If you look at 6.7., the whole idea is to move away from JBoss, which is more rigid, to Kafka and Dockers. The use case that we're looking at is to host 6.7 components on Apache Kafka and on Dockers, so that every component, be it the process engine or the Adapter Engine, is running as a container. Then we can scale up and down, on the fly, with Kubernetes and other Docker engines. That's what we are looking at. We also want to make all our systems cloud-ready, for future use. That is the reason we would be buying the Active-Active license and moving to 6.7. That way, we could spin up containers on the cloud, irrespective of which cloud service provider it is. That is where we are going.

In terms of the solution automating processes, back in the day when we bought it, SEEBURGER helped us with that. We put forward our business requirements and they had their set of business processes already built-in. They tweaked that for Ingram Micro's needs and, after that, we took care of all the development. SEEBURGER has not been involved, recently, in optimizing anything or developing anything for us.

An example of automation that we have done is if you look at our deployment model. Earlier, when you had to deploy a process-design project, you had to go to the server login and run some shell scripts by yourself. What we did was we created a bot, made in Java. It acts like an Ansible script wherein it executes the shell scripts and other scripts behind the server. But recently SEEBURGER also upgraded their product and they have kept the Deployment Manager that comes with it, out-of-the-box. So all the things that we did back then using a bot are now available as an API with Deployment Manager.

As of now, we are not using Deployment Manager. We really want to use it. That bot I mentioned was custom made by me. All the knowledge about it is limited to me. Tomorrow, if we want to expand the functionality of the bot, I will have to develop it. But when it comes to Deployment Manager, all the functionality is being provided by SEEBURGER and if something breaks down, we know we can reach out to SEEBURGER. There are plans to move away from the bot and use Deployment Manager.

We have developed a few portals that act like a wrapper in front of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), so that partner onboarding becomes easy and we can publish our transactions. Usually the basic components of a developer portal are for exposing all the APIs and giving documentation about them. With the SEEBURGER solution, we have developed something like a developer portal where we have exposed all the generic processes and the APIs along with the descriptions of the APIs. That means partners can come in and onboard themselves, and then they can start business with Ingram Micro. We have done that as a wrapper, but it's not something that SEEBURGER gave us out-of-the-box.

Overall, I would rate the solution at nine out of 10. It's been pretty reliable for us, development is easy, and the support is doing a decent job. I am not giving it a 10 because of their capabilities in adopting new technologies. Also, the way they got the word out about the product was a little old-fashioned. Recently, they have been doing a good job on that, but I think they could go farther. Their competitors have flourished in the market a lot. SEEBURGER was lacking in marketing, but they have recently become more active. They have regular meetings and they have workshops, to be competitive and to talk about the new technology and capabilities they're working on. They have started to improve on that side, but I think there's a long way to go.

On-premises

We are an automotive parts supplier and we exchange purchase orders, releases, shipment forecasts, as well as ASNs—shipment notifications, one of the most important documents—invoices, and some non-EDI files. We support North America and South America, but we have colleagues in Europe and Asia as well. We are communicating with most of the automotive companies: Ford, Volvo, Magna, Chrysler and we use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for transactions in the automotive field.

We also use the translator, BIC 6 Converter, and most of the protocols for communication: AS2, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, OFTP, FTPS. We also communicate with some banks.

We have been able to automate processes using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). For example, we have a lot of scheduled tasks or jobs that automatically pull information from other FTP servers, according to a schedule. These automatic flows or processes have reduced costs in a lot of environments, for sure. There are fewer people needed for a specific process in the plant. Also, the timing and accuracy of the information have improved which also helps reduce costs.

It has also helped enable digital business processes in our organization. A lot of processes are now in our BIC 6 system, which helps to improve operations in our plants.

In addition, we only have 30 minutes to send ASNs to a partner, and if this is not achieved we can be subject to fees or lose points in programs, which is not good for the plants. We accomplish this with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Similarly, payments and invoices are sent using the BIC 6 application and the time it takes to receive payments has been decreased.

All of its features are needed for our business and the EDI we have with all our partners. Among the most important are the 

• BIC 6 Converter 
• communication protocols, which have the newer security features for certificates and encryption
• communication with SAP, which is our core system 
• SEEBURGER BIC 6 front end.

In addition, the B2B portal is a good improvement, a good solution.

It's really the complete system that is the most valuable for us.

There are a lot of service packs during the year. I know that part is the process for updating features, but sometimes it's difficult to update service packs every month.

In my current company I have been using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for four years, and I used it in another company for five years.

It's very stable. We have not had too many issues with the stability of the system. During the year there may be one or two out outages, but in the last year we haven't had any big issues.

Our company is always growing, so we will need a more robust system and, eventually, we will have to go to the cloud. We are very close to having to grow our SAP system. SAP will definitely go to the cloud at some point, so we will need to grow our system, hardware, and architecture in our data center, and BIC 6 for sure.

The scalability is good.

The support is good. 

There is an issue in that sometimes I try to send all the information in my first email, such as the logs and system information, but the ticket that results is different, and support asks for information that we already sent in the first email. I don't know what helpdesk or system they use, but that delays support a little bit. Since I am in Mexico, I end up waiting for another seven or 10 hours to get an answer in which they ask me for something that I already sent. It's not a big deal, but it's an opportunity for improvement.

We had an issue with a certificate with one of our trading partners on a Saturday. We called SEEBURGER support. It was a little difficult because they needed to contact a developer who was not available. But the next day the issue was fixed, and we got the support.

Also, because sometimes there is a delay in the number of service packs we have, when support is needed, the answer is always, "You need to update your version of the service pack." So a reduction in the number of service packs during the year would help. I think 6.7 and the cloud have something along these lines, but for customers like us who are on-premise, the service pack upgrades are difficult.

But as a company, they are always in touch with us and trying to give us what we need. That is the most important thing. They want to see what our needs are and what our current situation is.

We did not have a previous EDI solution.

The setup is not complex. Sometimes what can make it complex is the number of flows or the amount of information. But in terms of the application itself, it's not complex.

The solution is deployed very quickly, even in minutes. The complicated part is testing all the flows with the new solution. That part can take months. For the last upgrade, it took about five months because we had to test all scenarios and business cases. When we found issues we had to report them to SEEBURGER. They had to fix them and we had to install the solution and test it again.

For upgrades, here in Mexico, there are two people from our company who are involved. In Europe there are another four or five more. The same teams manage it on a daily basis. We have developers, people on the communication teams, and business analysts using it. Overall, there are about 10 people using it in North America, and in Europe there are another 10.

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

The biggest lesson I've learned from using the solution is that integration is always possible. I have learned that there are many ways to integrate and exchange information in a timely and accurate way.

Having accurate information on time is the most important thing for me. That's the way other people can make decisions. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) helps you to do that.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) provides us with the solutions we need. We will see with version 6.7 if there is something else. I know there are more features in it. But for now, with version 6.5.2, we have all that we need. We want to see if 6.7 will give us other things that we can use.

To be honest, for us, the most compelling reason to upgrade to 6.7 is the end of support for our current version. If we don't upgrade, we won't have the support. But at the same time, the new version should have some improvements that will make things easier in our jobs and daily operations. I have heard that it has many new applications and a new portal. We could survive with the current solution, but there won't be fixes for it any longer. Also, it's good to have a new version with new APIs and new features.

On-premises