IBM B2B Integrator Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability of this solution is really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability is also very good; love that.

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

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

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

I would definitely recommend this product.

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

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

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

It has a number of different components that can fit together. People can use it partially or fully. It also integrates with some of the mounting tools like IBM Transformation Extender and it's a B2B Gateway rather than just a BDI translator.

They've modernized the solution recently and added some things where BDI translators have been around for a long time, and they've added things like advanced coms and global mailboxing to make it much more real-time with higher availability. So it's good value for our organization.

I think it needs some additional things like visibility. That's why we look to partners who provide that kind of visibility and I think that's something that could be changed. The product is stable but I think there are some things that they can do to enhance it, to make it a little bit more stable in terms of visibility of transactions.

Sterling B2B Integrator is a transactional tool to manage the flow of EDI centric transactions to and from your trading partners. It also works with an add-on product called ITX Advanced (ITXA).

As transactions flow through, the users would like to see the status if each of the transactions, or an analytic view of a number of transactions. For example, a user might say “tell me how many EDI claims failed validation today or this week?” Or how much order volume in terms of dollars was processed today?

I had that request from a VP of Sales when I was an EDI Coordinator. He would come by every day and ask “have we hit $1M yet in orders today?” He was not technical, and wouldn’t be able to run queries on a database, for example, so if the tool could give a dashboard with the transaction totals, both in physical transactions (i.e. 15,783 POs today) as well as business level information (those PO’s totaled $1.3M in orders, or $450,883 for product A, and $78,932 for product B, etc.), that would be valuable to business users.

Some of IBM’s partners, like Lightwell and CoEnterprise, have been building these dashboards as part of their offering as they have seen a gap in the IBM product.

For example, CoEnterprise offers a solution called Syncrofy to do this.

It's pretty stable.

It scales pretty well.

Sometimes it's hard to get through to the right people in support. It takes some time. My questions tend to be beyond Level 1, so I may need to get to the higher levels of support which can take some time and be a little frustrating.

It was already in place when I got here. I know a lot of tools in this area have been around for a long time and they didn't really change that much. IBM has modernized it a fair bit so you make sure you're keeping up with changes in the industry.

I would say to be careful with the visibility. I think they're going in the right direction in a lot of ways, depending on the transformation that you need. We've got a built-in to the Sterling B2B product, which is good for basic transformation and mapping, but anything advanced would probably require something superior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a pretty stable solution.

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

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

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

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

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

We use the Windows version of this solution. It integrates with a proprietary, SQL-based ERP. It provides standard EDI using VAN, AS2, FTP, SFTP, HTTP. 

The full cycle from order to payment is covered. Also, it performs XML realtime transactions where customers can check stock, order status, and place realtime orders. 

B2B Integrator has reduced manual entry of purchase orders. Everything from the order to fulfillment to the payment process, except for physical packing and shipping, is fully automated for some customer orders.

The most valuable feature is having a full set of tools in one place to create customized business processes, mapping, and connectivity. It includes everything you need for B2B. 

The improvements that need to be made are mostly little things.

The Extended Rule windows in the mapper only have two settings: small window or full screen. When working on an elaborate rule, I end up creating it in notepad and then pasting it into the Extended Rule window, which is not convenient.

We have been using this solution for twelve years.

The extendability is the most important feature, which we need. Needless to say, we like the way it works almost seamlessly with WebSphere products. Our work is mainly dependent on WebSphere, so Sterling fits in well for us.

From India's perspective, you are now completely changing the way e-commerce is happening. Efficiency, accuracy, and reliability are extremely important factors and Sterling B2B currently provides them.

It's a successful product and a big improvement for us. There are some areas of improvement, but what we thought it would deliver and the reality is pretty close.

Sterling cognitive analytics is a big thing. If they can do that, that will be great.

Stability is good.

Scalability is great.

Technical support is the issue I have. I think IBM has to do much better in terms of product support. IBM consultants, the software group consultants, are unbelievably expensive, and their support is of lower quality. The good part is that there is a knowledge base throughout the web and so we leverage that. But an improvement area for IBM is to provide better product support.

Our original architecture was WebSphere-based, so we were an IBM Business Partner. We started looking around and Sterling, of course, came out. So, it was a natural fate, more or less.

I myself was not involved in the initial setup, but our company was. We had some really good, smart Sterling folks, so it was OK for us. It was challenging, but it was OK for us. But, I heard it's a nightmare. This is why people hire us for Sterling work.

Actually, there were quite a few alternatives, but we are an IBM Business Partner and we rely on IBM. We try to fit in with IBM solutions, more or less. But we looked at TIBCO and we looked at something from Oracle as well; and there was a Microsoft product.

Get a Sterling expert. Without that, the product might not be successful.

• Partner onboarding
• In-house application
• Enterprise integration
• B2B EDI enabling
• Single point integration solution

This solution supports almost all enterprise integrations and B2B/EDI protocols and messaging standards. It provides a clear roadmap and visibility on product upgrades and features.

• Allows for easy integration with heterogeneous applications.
• Out-of-box process orchestration yields quick implementations.

• API-Fication required, and there should be more clarity on their cloud migration strategy.
• Map translator needs more enhancements.
• End-to-end visibility and monitoring application required. The control center is available and covers this area, but it still fails in many monitoring scenarios.