IBM Sterling B2B Integration Services Reviews

It is essentially a service bus that exposes a whole bunch of services. You can call them microservices that are orchestrated by business processes; that is the essence of the product.

It addresses two things, i.e., it basically gives the organizations the ability to manage their communities/their partner communities, by receiving information or files from multiple organizations or multiple partners, in multiple protocols like FTPS, FTP, FPS AS2 and so on. It also allows them to do transformation and intelligent routing, inside the organization at a very high level. That's what it does.

They can certainly streamline and I think that they already are working on this in their future roadmap, in the different interface they have. Today, given the legacy it has, a lot of the setups actually need to be done in different places. The consolidation or the aggregation of all those user interfaces into one and giving more flexibility to extend the user interface in a more flexible way with modern technologies, would help.

I have been using this solution for about seven years now.

Any solution is only as good as to how it is built, so this solution is no different. It is basically set up by giving building blocks to the end user to implement. If and when the implementation is done properly, it is quite a stable product.

It needs to be architected to scale, but it can be scalable.

There is a very good support from IBM on this portfolio and it's a well-understood portfolio. It is a well-understood product, under the MFT portfolio. Thus, it is a fairly comprehensive support ecosystem that we have.

The setup is not straightforward, but it is fairly well documented. However, somebody has to understand the matrix of the documentation because it is all over the place.

This product is fairly out there in terms of usability and easy to use, such as you can implement and deploy. It's a fairly good product.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor is that it needs to have a certain amount of reliability on the platform and good documentation for us to be able to take the product, take the framework and then build on top of it.

The IBM documentation is fairly good. It has been built over the years and it's at the point where it is pretty mature with a few exceptions on the emerging areas but for the most part, it is a fairly well-documented product. It has what it needs for the most part, i.e., for 90% of enterprises and for 10% edge case needs a whole lot of heavy outside of the box customization or heavy automation. For the most part, it works as marketed.

For us, we've basically outsourced the onboarding and translation of all of our electronic data interchange (EDI) with our customers. We've got a lot of trading partners. The value that they talked about bringing forth is that IBM has a lot of connections with trading partners, so we shouldn't have to start from ground zero on each one.

So far, it's probably been pretty neutral.

We're looking for analytics to try to predict when customers have issues on their side. If a customer traditionally would send records through on certain volumes on certain days and there's an interruption in that volume, we want IBM to tell us when our customers are having trouble before our customers tell us they have trouble or before we detect that we're not getting the loads. Can they do some analytics or trending to predict that? That's what we're asking them to do.

I need to see the innovation that they talked about in the road map actually come to fruition.

We actually had an issue the morning I provided this review. We are looking for IBM to be a little more proactive and predictive in finding issues, for example, of file size and things along those lines. We had a customer send through a file erroneously that was too big for them to handle in their service, so it blew up our processes. What we're asking IBM to do is be proactive and see those files before it impacts our whole system.

Technical support resolved our issue very quickly, but I asked, "Why can't you use Watson to help figure that out before it blows up and interrupts my company's business?"

I kind of was involved with the initial setup. I've taken this group on since then, but my manager was very involved in that. Ours setup is complex, but they did a good job.

Our CIO had a relationship with IBM and said, "I want to do it." I think that we looked to use this relationship, as opposed to considering other vendors.

The biggest thing for me when choosing a vendor is that, if I have issues, I need to know that they're going to help me resolve it from an immediate perspective and long term.

From our perspective, we've really outsourced an entire team. That has gone very well if that's what you're looking for. They do have some of the basic setups with some customers. It's probably not as much as they sold us in their value proposition, so be cautious about that. They do have a platform. They do deliver what they said they're supposed to do. You just got to look at it; keep your eyes open.