IBM B2B Integrator Reviews

The business processes are the most valuable features. We were using FTP before. We are migrating to Sterling MFT. We are doing some modifications to send and receive files, and we are managing them with business processes.

Sterling B2B Integrator is a managed file transfer program. Beforehand, we were using FTP and each FTP server was standalone, not controlled by any management facility. Now we have migrated to Sterling B2B Integrator and we have Control Center. We can manage all file transfers by Control Center. We can also create new file transfers over Control Centers without doing some things on the File Gateway. We can also do that over the File Gateway.

It doesn't support the Turkish language now. They said they will support Turkish in the new release, so we are waiting. It's a problem now because we are opening this product to our customers, not only internal users. For internal users, maybe it's acceptable to use English but it's not acceptable for customers. They are working on it and, actually, by the end of this year, it will be available.

Stability is good because we are using the high availability mode. We are using two SFG (Sterling File Gateway) nodes. They are clusters in an active-active configuration, and we don't have any interruptions. The only bottleneck is in the database part and we are working to do something about it by speaking with IBM to see how we can solve this problem.

Scalability is good. When we were using FTP, it was not scalable; you have to install new servers for each one. With Sterling B2B Integrator, you can manage and collect everything on the same platform. It is an end-to-end solution. We have a mainframe, we have Sterling Connect: Direct on the mainframe, we have File Gateway, we have Unix and Windows Connect: Directs , and we have some security parts of Secure Proxies. Also, we did some integration with our LDAP Active Directory, so we don't create named users for company users. We just give permissions based on job function and adjust it. We don't need to create local users. That's why it's very scalable for us.

Actually, we started migration in 2015, and we are getting very good support from IBM. We also have other products from IBM and being a big company in Turkey. We are managing cases or PMRs like other products and we can get extra support. There are some clever technical guys there. We have direct contact with them and they support us when we need them.

As I've mentioned, the reason why we chose Sterling B2B Integrator instead of others was that it has an end-to-end solution. It has mainframe parts, it has Unix and Windows parts and it is also a centrally managed system with Control Center. It is good and better than others.

There are some other solutions, but they don't cover everything. You have to use some other product for the mainframe side. You have to use some other management tools or something like that.

That's why we chose Sterling Integrator; it has good functionality. It is guaranteed file transfer delivery. FTP doesn't guarantee it. With FTP, you send a file, it says it can, but maybe it cannot.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We also evaluated Globalscape CuteFTP, CA XCOM, and IBM's own FTP solution. We were using IBM FTP on the mainframe side, and we were using CuteFTP on the server side. Some other groups in my company were also looking at Globalscape. We created a requirement list together with the security team and the servers team, to evaluate which solution can cover everything. IBM was successful, so we chose IBM Sterling.

We were already customers of IBM. We actually knew Sterling. It's not a new product. It was a Sterling company product, then it was acquired by IBM. It's better for us; that's why we are using Sterling now.

I recommend it.

It is GUI-based and has a very user-friendly interface. The new version of Sterling B2B Integrator has easy-to-use business processors and also built-in service-assigned adapters. That helps a lot. Instead of having to create them from scratch, you can just use the ones which were already created and then you can customize them according to your needs.

It definitely helps do things faster and with fewer errors. It is more efficient.

I would like to see a more step-by-step way of doing things. Even though it is a GUI-based interface, there are certain things that will get stuck if you do not understand it. I would like to see that be included along with the instructions.

It is more than 90% stable. I haven't seen it slowing down or crashing, or any of those types kind of things.

Scalability is more than 90%.

I use IBM support from time to time. I use them because there are certain things we have not done before. While installing, we had some hands-on issues with the new versions.

I have mixed feelings about technical support, because they are very good sometimes. It's very hard to reach the correct source, but they are very knowledgeable, if you can find the right person. It's a 50/50 experience.

It was a bit complex to reach the person who knows what we are trying to fix. I know they are capable of helping once we get to the right person.

We have been using this product for the last 10-13 years. They get better and better every time they have a new version. They fix issues that we had in the previous versions. We always want to keep up with the latest and the greatest.

I was involved in the initial setup. It has changed a lot since we had them in the past.

They are trying to come up with the more user-friendly GUI based solutions for installations. The first time we did it, it took time to understand.

I have done a couple of upgrades on the same installation. The second or third experience is better than the first experience.

We evaluated IBM and GXS. We chose IBM because they are the world leader, their market is huge, and they are reliable. Their people have knowledge if you run into any issues once you start using it and if you need support.

When selecting a vendor, I look for pricing, scalability, reliability, and the basic things.

I would definitely recommend others to go with this solution. You can learn and invest in the future rather than selecting a solution in which you do not know if it's going to last for long.

It has a very powerful dashboard interface and as well has very powerful business orchestration built into the tool. It's one, central information exchange - that was the need of our business, we are a managed service for the translation of files. That is the core strength of the tool that we are leveraging, to deliver a managed service. It is a multi-tenant managed service that we are trying to build using B2B on ITXA (IBM Transformer Extender Advanced). Those features are the core strength of our solution architecture.

The real benefits are the out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM's healthcare package with an option to customize the maps. The out-of-the-box capabilities cover 90% of your business requirements.

Also, it gives you clear direction on how to handle the gap between what is being offered and what the customer is looking for.

I would like if they would expose some of the traffic patterns and status state information in the control center; also, to send state information to some of the trading partners as well. And some of the features we would like to see are with the ease of high availability and the ease of failing over.

Stability is something that we're working on. It's a brand new system. It's a debut system, and we have one tenant on board. We are planning to bring in 15 more tenants. So, this is not something that was introduced a long time ago. The stability is great right now. We are working with IBM to size our system and extrapolate our needs for the next five years. As of now, the stability is good, but we are looking for better and a highly scaled system in the near future.

Scalability is easy if it is implemented right. Adding nodes to the cluster and taking them out of the cluster is very seamlessly implemented into the tool.

We have pretty good and competent technical support and dedicated account managers from the IBM side. They're very responsive, time-sensitive and appropriate.

We did not have a previous solution. This is a brand new solution we put together.

For the initial setup, there was some learning curve on our side, being an account, but with IBM's help, we were able to do it easily. It could have been difficult, but with IBM's help we did it. I wouldn't call it easy, but it took as long as it did to do it right.
The difficulty is not with the tool but with bringing the team up to speed and giving them room to play with it. There's a learning curve with these environments, and once you set it up, it was downhill.

We evaluated multiple products. This is the one we have narrowed on. The other solutions are also from IBM tools. We were considering whether to use DataPower and their MQ Managed File Transfer as B2Bi and also some other EDI products. At one point, we were even considering TIBCO, but we evaluated all of them.

When selecting a vendor, we were looking for one unified platform where we can do business process orchestration, translation, compliance check, and also multi-tenancy.

If they are looking for a B2Bi solution, and I'm assuming that solution also will leverage some of the cognitive strengths of Watson, it's an awesome B2Bi solution. If anybody has a B2Bi business case, this is definitely one of the solutions, a mature solution in the market that they can consider.

The EDI conversion is the only thing I like about it. We have got a lot of clients, maybe 6000-plus clients and around 15 flavors of EDIs. We get EDIs from them, do the conversion, send it to either the IBM Integration Bus (IIB) or create IDOCS to SAP and for the other direction, as well.

We have got a lot of purchase orders and invoices coming through, which is the only door in and out to the company. Thus, it's kind of a critical path for us.

Probably, the mapping aspect needs to be improved. The stability is also something to look into; definitely we need that for now, but for the future, the mapping process is not that great.

It needs good monitoring. We are experiencing issues in terms of the speed and also for trying to clean up and back up.

We did experience stability issues. That part I'm not too happy about. I think we need to work on it. Sometimes it is slow, so we had to kind of clean out the database. We are trying to look more into that.

We are in the process of contacting the technical support team. I would give them a 6/10 rating.

We were using mainframe. We were going to get rid of mainframe and that product wasn't going to survive out of mainframe. So, we had to look at something else.

I'm not an administrator, so I didn't hear much in terms of the installation. I think it was smooth.

Test it thoroughly, not just carry out surface-level testing. Make sure the business logic works as to how you're going to store the data, how much data you will need, how slow it's going to be, i.e., once you've stored the data against it and so on.

We use it to move data files back and forth in a secure fashion. That's primarily what we do.

We move quite a bit of files. It gives us the ability to have a system in place that moves all those files and delivers them to the appropriate recipients.

I would like to see more analytics and more information gathering about what is going where. Right now, we don't have good insight as to what's going where within the ecosystem.

The stability has been fine in our ecosystem. We could have done the deployment implementation a little differently because we have two sites.

We should have had two sites up and running. That deployment was a little lacking. I think we probably could have fostered something a little better.

It scales well if you have enough money. It is a very expensive platform.

We have had no issues with technical support.

I was not involved in the setup.

You have to look at a lot of factors such as:

• Scalability
• High availability
• Disaster recovery
• Usability
• Performance

Just do your homework. That's all it boils down to. Every vendor and every customer is going to be different, depending on their host system.

It offers us an opportunity to communicate both internally and externally with data, and transformation and integration in general.

It gives us high visibility and the ability to transform data. We can move it between different platforms, transform it from one format to another, do encryption and decryption. It is very flexible.

With Sterling Integrator, as it comes out of the box, there's not a lot of things that have been developed. A lot of it you have to develop yourself with BPML, and developing of APIs and things like that for web solutions and front end. So I would like to see some other things come out of the box.

I've been using it since 1994-95, starting out with Gentran:Server. It's been around forever and it's very stable, very portable, very flexible.

We can grow it as big as we need it.

On a scale of 1-10, there are times technical support is a 9; other times it's a 5.

I've used a number of different tools. We had Connect:Enterprise, which is a tool that is no longer supported; Gentran:Server on mainframe; and we had a Control Center on Linux and Sterling Integrator on another Linux. So we had a number of tools in different categories of our business and just knew that we needed to consolidate and bring everything under one piece of software so that we could manage it better with Connect:Direct, Connect:Enterprise, with encryption and decryption. So it was just a smart solution to put it all under one tool.

There are some gaps that need to be filled in the initial setup. Especially when you're working in a multi-node environment. The issue is with port identification. We have latency issues with the application sometimes and there needs to be more customer visibility from the knowledge side with ways to overcome the latency issues. It took a couple of weeks to get support to provide us with alternatives for using extended ports in a clustered environment.

There are many other vendors. You have GXS and Data Masons, which is a Microsoft tool that was the vantage point for EDI.

We looked at all of the opportunities out there and came to a decision based on what it offered us now and in the future for integration; what kind of migrations would need to take place, what the timeline would be, how long it would take, how much consulting would be required. So, we looked at all aspects of it.

When selecting a vendor, stability is most important. There are a lot of vendors out there that offer solutions that are gobbled up or they go away or the solution they provide is no longer available. So, IBM offers a lot. Of course, they purchased the B2B application as a part of their portfolio from Sterling Integrator, but IBM is an excellent solution because of the stability of the company.

Really look at what your business needs are and make sure that your business needs and the tool that you are purchasing fits those needs. Just because you've used it in the past, just because you know somebody who's used it in the past, doesn't mean it's a good solution for you. It has to be something that fits the business needs. Where's your business going? What are your future needs? You have to think out of the box. You can't stay in the box in this environment because it is constantly growing and evolving.

I find the codeless communications, SFTP or FTP, valuable.

The mapping, visibility, deployment, and the dashboard could be improved and updated.

The communication logs are very poor. They are not easily understood, and we need to navigate to many places for many reasons. You can't just pull the information; it's very tough.

I've been working with this solution for 16 years.

We have an on-premises license, but it is installed in the cloud.

It's a stable solution. The stability is the best part.

There are no problems with scalability. We have 10 users.

Technical support is very slow. They do not seem to understand the situations we encounter and their severity.

The initial setup is pretty simple.

I would rate IBM B2B Integrator at six on a scale from one to ten.

• It has a number of different components that can fit together.
• People can use or not use certain things.
• It integrates with some of the tools like IBM Transformation Extender.
• It is a B2B gateway rather than just an EDI translator.

They have modernized the solution recently and added some things. EDI translators have been around for a long time, so they've added things like advanced coms and global mail-boxing to make it much more real-time and with high availability. It is a good value.

Visibility would probably be the most important thing, so I can see the transactions points through and start to do some analytics from them.

I think it's pretty stable. It needs some additional things like visibility. That's why we look to partners who provide that kind of visibility. That is something that could be changed.

The product is stable. 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.

The scalability is pretty good. It scales pretty well.

I have used technical support. Sometimes, it's hard to get through to the right people. It takes some time. My questions tend to be beyond level one, so I may really need to get to the higher levels of support. That can take some time and it can be a little frustrating.

Be careful with the visibility. I think they are going in the right direction in a lot of things. Depending on the transformation that you need, we've got that built-in to the Sterling B2B product, which is good for basic transformation and mapping, but anything advanced would probably need Transformation Extender.

When selecting a vendor, I look for company stability and the direction of the product.

I know a lot of tools in this area have kind of been around for a long time and they didn't really change that much. IBM has done a lot to modernize it a fair bit, so it's been a pretty important bit.

Make sure you are keeping up with changes in the industry.

It is a decent solution and it has room for improvement.