SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

We're primarily using it for communication and translation of our traditional EDI documents. We're an automotive supplier so a big part of our business is automotive related, but we're also using it for synchronous APIs or web services with some of our customers or trading partners.

Of course, not everything we're doing is EDI. We're doing a lot of distribution of unstructured files, even in our company, transactions between systems. With the mapper, we're doing data transformation as well, to integrate back to our back-end ERP system. We're also using the Message Tracking component, which allows us to confirm what's come in and what has processed.

About 90 percent of our global EDI transaction volume is coming in and out of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We have different application development groups within IT. My area is primarily EDI and integrations, but in some of the other areas, like HR or payroll or shipping, there's a great need to transfer files and data with their trading partners. Those partners could be a bank or an HR company or a payroll company. The folks in our other application areas don't really have any experience with communications and integrations. Where I'm able to improve our organization is that all I need to do is have them tell me, "Hey, I need to get a file or send a file to this trading partner, can you help me?" Then I'm able to work with them and get that set up and tested.

Our other application development folks don't have to spend time worrying about doing that part of the project. I'm something like a middleman and using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has decreased the turnaround time on a lot of these projects.

Also, one of the things that SEEBURGER always touts is their ability to do "any to any" formatting. I really didn't understand it when we first got the product, but what I've come to find is it doesn't matter if you want to take a CSV file or an XML file or a flat file or a PDF file or a structured EDI file; you can transform it from one format to another - any to any or even to the same format - which is a really nice feature. We deal with a lot of different databases and structures in our company. We don't have a single system. We used to have a lot of problems trying to integrate our different locations. This has allowed us to seamlessly integrate our different database products together.

One example is that we had a project where we needed to have a consolidated sales history from all of our regions loaded into a third-party product that runs an SQL database. Of course, all our legacy systems are in the iSeries or AS/400. What we were able to do, since they didn't really integrate directly with an SQL database, was to have them generate CSV files and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was able to pick them up from their respective host systems, translate them, and load them to the SQL database records. It was quite easy and we didn't have to spend a bunch of money trying to add an Oracle Database or some other database that we really didn't need.

In terms of reaction time since implementing the solution, the connectivity between unlike systems is much easier. It involves less programming. The other thing is that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is a JavaScript or a Java-based system within their mapping tool. You can actually write a lot of code in there. We can perform a lot of the translations even within our mapping, whereas we used to have to do custom programming on our back-end systems to fully integrate. Being able to put everything in one place has streamlined the mapping and the integration process. That has saved at least one-third of the time.

The one thing about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) that we really liked is that it's what I would call "platform independent." Most of our systems back in 2012 were on an AS/400 or iSeries and there were some limitations with that. We really wanted to find a product that could communicate with all platforms.

In addition to that, we really like the AS2 communication adapters, which allow us to not use a VAN and for data to be pushed between trading partners. That's a big feature we really like.

Then, in our landscape, we have a lot of AS/400s or iSeries and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has a file service listener that allows data to seamlessly be transferred between the SEEBURGER solution and the AS/400. That was a very big part of it.

There are also a lot of alerting and notifications within it that allow us, even though we have a very small staff, to manage and monitor a very large number of EDI transactions.

One of the biggest features, as well, is the Mapping Designer because that's what we were looking to upgrade in addition to just communication protocols; we wanted to get a more modern mapper that we could use for both EDI documents and other types of unstructured data.

The BIS Front End needs a little bit of refreshing, especially when it comes to setting up new trading partners and trading partner agreements or transactions. It can be a bit clumsy to copy and rename and then go in and modify. That could be improved a little bit.

Also, on the server side, there are a lot of administration and configuration files that you need to go in and do maintenance on. You have to find them in a certain folder so it's very error-prone and it can be a little time consuming unless it's documented. They could pull some of those individual configuration files into the product itself where there's a better user interface for that.

In terms of adding features, they've recently talked about a few. One is a way to manage your web services or your APIs. That would be a big help because, right now, we have four web services and there's quite a lot of setup to each. They're in different areas within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). It's my understanding that they're going to be able to pull that together so you can view that entire setup in a more streamlined manner. That's something we're looking forward to.

The stability is good, as long as you have the database sized correctly and your server sized with the right amount of processors. It's been very good for us.

We did run into a situation where at one point we didn't have enough memory on our servers. It became slow and we had some issues there. But once we recognized what the issue was and made a correction, it was resolved quite quickly.

So, it's very stable. Of course, we're really dependent on the Windows environment and SQL Server environment. It's only going to be as stable as those platforms are.

We've had to increase the core processing units in our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) central instance, maybe twice, and the same with memory and disk storage. We've been able to wait until the need has come and not use up all that extra processing and memory that we didn't need.

There was documentation on how to do it and when to do it but we still used consulting services to have them direct us. We said, "Here's what we're going to do. Is this correct?" and they were able to lead us through anything we needed to do to scale up and pick up more transactions or more disk space.

So, scalability is pretty good. Right now we're only running a central instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They allow you to split it up into individual instances. If we wanted to separate the US from Europe we could do that, and allocate different resources to each. That's another area where they're scalable. It's been pretty good for us so far.

Technical support is located in Germany and there are different levels of support you can pay for. Regardless of your support level, you're able to open tickets and, based on the severity of the ticket, they get back to you. They're all very knowledgeable of the system and they know where to pinpoint.

I will say that if the issue is something new to your company, something you haven't done before, they will refer you to consulting services which are billable. They won't do any development or the like for you. But they will troubleshoot problems.

The only thing I'm not crazy about is that, while they all speak English, they have a heavy accent in a lot of cases. Sometimes that can be difficult, depending upon who you're working with. Other than that, we've had no problems with their technical support.

The consulting services we work with, because we're in the Michigan area, are all working out of the Atlanta office. We're always working with them over the phone and through emails, so not onsite. They're are also very knowledgeable and they've come to get familiar with our implementation and how we're using their products. It really cuts down on some of the cost when we have a project because the consultants we're working with are familiar with our company. So, overall support is pretty positive.

In terms of response time, if it's a situation where you're saying you're down, they're supposed to call you within one hour, and in my experience, that's always been the case. We haven't had an experience where they're not getting ahold of us. Beyond that, if it's more of a question or you don't understand something, then it falls into another category and it might be later that day or the next day. That's fine. It's been good.

We have our own technical resources onsite. We have a server group and a firewall group and I'm the EDI application guy. We were used to a lot of the terminology and stuff from the past. With that in mind, I thought the setup was quite straightforward.

They provided us with a hardware-sizing questionnaire, which was really helpful in determining our server requirements. Thinking back - it's been six years - it really seemed to go a lot smoother than it could have gone, especially since it was a brand-new product to us.

Regarding our implementation strategy, what we wanted to do first was move all of our communications with our VANs and our direct trading partners into SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). That meant we weren't doing the translation and the mapping within the solution, but all of the communications were done through it. What that allowed us to do was to pull all of our trading partners together from Europe and South America and North America into one place and have all the communications flowing through one area. That allowed us to support it a lot more easily and to take advantage of that AS2 protocol.

That was our initial strategy, to do communications, and then follow that up by doing the mapping, one trading partner or one transaction set at a time. And that's what we've done.

With any new product or implementation, usually there's a driving force. One of the things we were asked to do was to implement a web service in Europe that we had no expertise in and we had no platform to run it on. SEEBURGER provided both of those. They showed us how to use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and we used their consulting services to assist us with the back-end integration. So, rather than put this web service or API in another place which would eventually have to be moved to a central location, we were able to incorporate it right into the SEEBURGER product.

Our first phase with communication for all of North America only took three months from the time they loaded it onto the system initially until we were cut over. And then, to pick up Europe, we didn't want to do everything at once. We worked on Europe after that and that was another three months. So, within six months we had our communications moved over and we were then moving onto the other phases.

When we deployed, we had one SEEBURGER consultant who was dedicated to us for that first three-month period. Then we had another one who came in and did some training and some of the planning with us. As far as our own internal resources go, there were three of us who identified all the trading partners and all the nuances of what needed to be set up and tested in the new system. All in all, it was about like three internal people and two SEEBURGER people.

We worked with SEEBURGER employees.

We've had some ROI. I'm not going to be able to give you any dollar numbers, but as far as headcount in my group goes, we used to have four or five people and now it's just me and one other. We're supporting the same number, and more, of trading partners than we used to. Right off the bat, that's a good savings.

All the new adapters are individually priced, which is good. You don't buy the whole system and then, if you don't use it it just sits there. You only buy the stuff you want, which is good. There are some components that are either new or that we didn't need at the time of implementation, so we added them later, or we have plans to add them in the future.

Sometimes it seems a little pricey, especially when some of the stuff is available through freeware, like SFTP communications. You can download a free copy of something and perform those type of functions. But we understand, as an IT group, that those are not long-term solutions that you want in your core processes. It costs a lot more money to buy this stuff from SEEBURGER but I think it's worth it in the long run.

Everything seems expensive to me, so I'm neutral on the pricing and the licensing.

We wanted to be platform-independent from our iSeries and AS/400, and we wanted a more modern product for our EDI integrations. We looked at SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) vs IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. We did a lot of demos and had a lot of conversations between the two. Ultimately, we ended up choosing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but those were the two primary vendors that we were evaluating.

The Sterling Integrator was a little bit more complex than it needed to be. It wasn't straightforward. The mapper was a little bit, I won't say clumsy, but it was a little bit busy, hard to understand. One of the big things we wanted to do was to have a new refresh mapper. Also, the pricing seemed to be a lot higher for what we were getting.

Based on the demos that we had - we had given a script of what we wanted to see from both companies - the way SEEBURGER presented it was much more straightforward and understandable. We could see ourselves moving to that product a lot easier than moving to the Sterling Integrator.

If you are looking to implement SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), talk to other companies that are already using it, some that are in the same industry. That would help you feel more comfortable with what it is you're getting into, and maybe open your eyes to some of the technical capabilities that the solution has that you really hadn't even thought about yet or which weren't presented to you in the sales pitch.

I would also advise doing a lot of planning, because some of the initial setup, design, and planning you do at the onset is hard to change down the road. Take some extra time when you're figuring out how you're going to set up your trading partners, what the naming conventions are, and things of that nature. It'll make it easier.

We've established a pretty good working relationship with our sales contact, and this has been important for us. If we want to have a demo of one of their new products, we're comfortable going to them and saying, "Hey, can you tell me more about this? Hey, can you do a WebEx session to show us how this works?" It's been helpful for us to maintain those relationships.

Obviously, with any new software, training is also something. Don't skimp on that. We did it in phases. We got training on the BIS Front End itself first, and then, when we were ready to start doing the mapping, we got training on the mapping. Down the road, we took some more advanced training. We were able to do it in phases, but it's something that you don't want to skip because there are a lot of good capabilities and different ways of doing things that, if you don't know about them, you may be shorting yourself on the solutions that you deliver.

We don't use the landscape manager but that is something we are interested in. I don't know a lot about it but it keeps track of the configuration of all your implementations so when you do an upgrade, it makes it much easier to manage. That's something we're going to be looking at with the new release of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

We don't do clustering. We just have a single instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) so I don't think we're using the Active-Active feature.

There are probably fewer than ten users of the solution in our organization. These are IT folks. They are the ones that really want visibility into the Message Tracking module to view the data that's come in or that went out to confirm that they're receiving the stuff they're looking for. Those transactions aren't with EDI people, they are people to whom we send a payroll file at a bank or a third-party payroll provider. The IT guys may want to monitor it.

Regarding staff required for maintenance, we have five people who are using the BIS Front End and the Mapping Designer. All five of us perform the daily monitoring activities and the trading-partner setup. We have it separated right now. We have three users in Europe and they're able to manage their own customers and suppliers. We do the same in North America. Two of us are doing the regular mapping tasks, while two of the others are occasional mappers. And one person is more of an administrator.

We have plans to continue utilizing SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and to use it for more non-EDI types of activity, such as payroll, banking, HR, different sales systems, warehouse management systems, and integration between ERP systems. There is seemingly an endless number of integration projects. In addition to that, we've begun to do a lot of the web services or the APIs, even within our ERP system. So our EDI transaction activity may be staying the same, but we're using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for a lot more of the non-EDI integration and data transformation stuff; not the typical automotive training partners, rather more financial related types of trading partners.

Overall I would rate the solution a nine out of ten, which is really high. I have been really happy with it. Of all the projects where people have come to me, I can't remember having to say, "No, we can't do that." We're able to deliver what I have been advertising since 2012, so it's meeting our needs. Most of the issues we've had have really been things that we've done to ourselves. It hasn't been the product or bugs in the software. Support has been pretty good, we've had consulting services that have gotten to work with us regularly and they know us, so we feel like we're in good shape to tackle some of the newer projects or bigger projects in the future.

The only thing I'm always wanting is that SEEBURGER doesn't seem to be doing a lot of marketing in the U.S. It's a German company, the founder is in Germany, and most of their development staff is over there. Not as many folks are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) in the U.S. They're using IBM and TrustedLink and those type of products. When I talk about SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), nobody knows what it is. I have to sell the product and what it can do. If SEEBURGER could do some marketing, do some reaching out to management, the executive level, to give them some visibility into this product, it would make my job easier.

While there are a lot of companies in the U.S. using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), we don't have a network or a users group. SEEBURGER has offered some sessions in the past, where you could go to Atlanta and they would give you a three-day update on new things they're doing, but there's no forum for users, other than on Facebook. There isn't really a users group that I know of where we could get together and do things, have conferences, etc.

We use the solution for EDI and file swaps, but it will be used for all integrations going forward.

We can control our upgrade cycle instead of being dependent on cloud vendor timing. We are also able to build and deploy quickly, but our speed is limited by our SOX controls.

• Scalability. We have not had to add processing power or hardware since we installed it.
• We are able to create and deploy maps to migrate from another EDI platform very quickly.
• The Active-Active feature probably also helps but it's hard to say for sure because we didn't have much load on the system prior to implementing it.

A true debugger that allows you to step through the process would be a good improvement. Right now, we are limited to reading the log file generated by the test screen in Mapping Designer.

It is very stable.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is highly scalable. Since moving to Active-Active we have not had to change our environment.

Technical support has always been great.

We switched from Dell AtomSphere.

The initial setup was somewhat complex. I would say you need SEEBURGER Professional Services to help you through it.

Deployment took a couple of days for each environment. Our implementation strategy was to deploy to our Dev/QA environments first and production at a later time. We deployed on-premise as we prefer to control the environment of our mission-critical systems.

Pricing has always seemed fair.

We evaluated:

• SEEBURGER BIS vs Dell AtomSphere
• SEEBURGER BIS vs Software AG
• SEEBURGER BIS vs MuleSoft
• SEEBURGER BIS vs SAP PI.

Create a matrix of criteria to evaluate all tools fairly.

In our company, we have ten to 12 users of the solution and they are very technical development/support people. Deployment and maintenance are shared among a team of people but SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) requires almost no maintenance.

EDI with automotive businesses is our primary use case.

For us, it's all been about the fact that, for the first time ever our two facilities can support each other. Before, we had completely separate systems. One was doing EDI and one wasn't and our customers were trying to understand how we could be one company and not do things the same way. For the first time, we can start doing things the same way. That means that I can have customer service in one facility support customer service in the second facility.

We started with our Canadian plant first and got it running. When the next plant came on we were just able to say in SAP, "Here are some new ship-to's." We didn't have to start re-testing with the customer. That saved a ton of work. Not needing to retest for the next facility, because the customer had accepted our first test, was very helpful.

In terms of our reaction time, I can say we are 50 percent faster from our American plant. We aren't faster in our Canadian plant, but that's only because we're also looking at trying the on-premise, so it's just from looking at too much at once. For the American side, they wouldn't say "yes" to a customer for years, but now they can, which is great.

It has a lot of basic EDI already established for all the main users.

Also, it lets me share setups that I had already set up for my first plant. I was able to use them for my second one which was very helpful. I didn't have to start from scratch for my second facility.

I would've liked, from day one, to learn how to do my own mapping. It would have saved a lot of time and effort if that had been brought forward earlier. It's there, I just didn't know about it.

Also, some tidier, easier-to-use interfaces would help.

It's a stable solution. In the year-and-a-half that we've been live, we've had one or two tiny blips. But you get the warning right away and you can reissue it. And it never repeats itself. Those are pretty good stats.

It's far bigger than we would ever need. Our company would never have an issue with their scalability. It goes far and beyond what we need.

I know my colleague in Germany values the technical support greatly. But the system works so well that he generally only needs it if a customer sends in a map that isn't straightforward. For me, on the on-premise side, the American tech support has been super-helpful and they bend over backward for me. If we could all have Daniel work onsite, that would be a dream. But they're all super-helpful. Everyone has bent over backward for us.

We went to SEEBURGER because we needed a global solution for the first time in our company's history. Up until then, each plant used to use its own EDI solution, because we had our own ERP solution. We switched to SEEBURGER to have a global solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I gave them an Excel and they did the work. I liked that.

Due to SEEBURGER jumping right on board for us in America, we did it fast. We didn't start talking until about the end of March, and we went live July first. So the workload was heavy from the end of May and June. There was some cleanup of some stuff after that, but they really pushed hard for us.

We were supposed to have set it up with SEEBURGER Germany, but somehow that got missed. So our implementation strategy was to jump on with SEEBURGER America. They were super-flexible and they helped us get all the information and make sure we were ready for the first plant, and then we went live in the second plant in October.

The only problems were caused by us because we didn't have enough manpower here.

I find the pricing expensive. But I know that when we evaluated another company, it was about the same. That just seems to be the market. It's probably not expensive overall.

Make sure your internal team has the manpower required and the knowledge, of course. It's big. It shouldn't be left up to SEEBURGER, the way I did. I made them do more work than they should have had to do.

To use the on-premise you need to have good technical people, not just business knowledge but also technical. That might be a drawback for some companies. The advantage is that they cover the EDI world: EDA, EDIFACT, ANSI. The American guys are great at their ANSI and EDIFACT and the European guys are great at EDA and EDIFACT. I don't know if it's true that every software company out there is able to cover all three of those worlds as well as these guys seem to.

In North America, there are only two of us using the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) Cloud version. It's 90 percent me doing all of the checking, communicating, and updating with the SEEBURGER team and my one SAP team member is there to back me up or answer questions. I don't think he's been on it since January 2018. We have two solutions, we have cloud and we have on-premise. Two more people use the on-premise.

Our plan is that we're actually moving everything to on-premise now. There will be two main people, myself and my colleague in Germany, who will be to the two main people for maintenance, and we're looking at one minor role in both Europe and America that will just be there to get the alerts, making sure there are no stoppages during the day. But the two of us will be the ones installing maps. If there's a map adjustment required, I would work on that, but the two of us will be doing the installing and mapping of the communication and new users.

In terms of the extent of usage and plans to grow, we have three plants using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), two plants on cloud, one on-premise. We just moved a small plant to on-premise last month and our plan is to move two more. Then, as our company rolls out SAP, we're looking at moving three more. If Asia jumps into EDI someday, it will grow even more, but right now the Asian market isn't using EDI. We'll see how that works out. We're hoping to, within the next year, move a Spanish plant onto it as well.

I would rate this solution at eight out of ten because it covers as much as it does. It's not higher because I think it might be missing a little bit of the non-automotive world. They focused on the big EDI-hitters, versus some of what I call the "industrial applications." That's the only place I've seen where it doesn't seem to be as strong.

We are using it mainly for EDI with a wide variety of trading partners. We do a lot of EDI transactions with a lot of our customers and vendors, as well as a few healthcare providers.

We have a lot of transactions, but we don't really have that big of a load. On a daily basis, we have around 2,000 transactions.

The EDI implementation that we used before took a while for us. Now we are able to do it pretty quickly. For the tool that we used to have, we had specially trained developers who used to do all the development of EDI maps and the configuration. But with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) now, we were able to train our EDI analysts, and because the tool has very simple, intuitive mapping capabilities, even our EDI analysts are able to develop all the EDI maps, do all the configurations, and do all the setups for any of the trading partners.

All in all, it has simplified our EDI implementation. It takes less time now.

In terms of adding integrations, whenever we have to, for example, add any new EDI trading partner, we are able to use existing maps that we have for other trading partners. It's like making a copy and creating a new map from that existing map and doing very minor changes here and there.

Also, when it comes to reaction time, when we started using this tool, initially, of course, we did not really have any people who were trained or had any experience on the tool. It was pretty new for us. Overall, the implementation time, the time it takes people to build new maps, has more to do with experience. But we have been able to reduce, by at least one-third, the time it takes, compared to what it used to take.

In general, I think the EDI tools that SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) has are pretty robust, pretty easy to use.

One thing that comes to mind is the service-oriented architecture. I have seen, in some of the other middleware tools, that you can create one service and then reuse it, without creating a copy. As I mentioned earlier, we create a copy of an existing map. In some of the other tools out there in the market, you can create one service and use that service without creating a copy. That kind of capability currently doesn't exist in this solution.

Also, these days, a lot of these companies are providing their solutions on the cloud. I think SEEBURGER has some presence there, but we're not really using it. For the future, they may have to provide more of a cloud-based solution.

The solution is pretty stable compared to what we used to have. We used to have a lot of memory-related issues, and we would have to restart the application multiple times. But SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is pretty stable.

There are regular production support issues, but other than those system-related issues, we don't really have that many.

Scalability-wise, I think there is still some scope but, overall, it's pretty scalable.

Tech support is pretty good. We have a Premium Support package, so they respond pretty quickly to us. They have offices in Germany and the US and they answer depending on who is available. They're pretty responsive and knowledgeable too.

We used to have a different solution. At the time that we bought this tool, we had also acquired another company. That company used to use a different tool. And for us, we were just using AS/400. We were trying to go to a better system that had more EDI capabilities. With the AS/400 we did not have a lot of capabilities that we were looking for in an EDI tool.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) fit very well with what we were looking for in the solution that we wanted to have in our company.

We utilized the Professional Services of SEEBURGER. They came and did all the installation for us. We had some of the solution architects from our company design what the system landscape should look like but, all in all, it was SEEBURGER that did the installation of the product.

When we bought SEEBURGER, at the same time we acquired another company. So it was like an SAP implementation we were trying to do and, on top of that, we acquired that other company. For us the project went pretty long because of all the complexities and all these other developments. It took us around a year or so until we first put something into production.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we just had the SEEBURGER consultants initially do some training for us. They did all the installation, and after we got the training, we did all the development and the implementation of the solution, as such.

As I said above, the tool that we used to have required those developers. We don't have those developers anymore, so we are saving that money. We have the same number of EDI analysts and they are able to do all the mapping. Because of the ease of use of the tool and the capabilities that the tool provides, we reduced the human resources that we used to need to support the previous tools. That's some money we are saving every year.

In terms of licensing also, it's cheaper than what we used to have. And, of course, the number of EDI partners that we are implementing is also a savings for us, moving any manual customers to EDI.

Pricing, compared to the tool that we had earlier, is cheaper. 

The way they have their licensing structure set up, they have a lot of different modules. For us, we did not really know if we were licensed for certain things or not. We had to reach out to them multiple times to tell them that we were looking for this or that capability. We had to buy licenses for different things at different points in time, not knowing that we could have it bundled initially.

We did evaluate webMethods vs SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). And because we were doing an SAP implementation and SAP had its own middleware tool, we evaluated SAP Process Integration. There were a couple of others. But overall, in terms of the EDI capabilities specifically, because we were mainly looking for the EDI, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stood out.

Training, of course, is really important. Get trained on the tool. If we could have used some of the consulting from SEEBURGER for the initial implementation, we could have learned best practices. Because now, when we go back and look at some of the EDI maps that we developed, now that we are experienced, we say, "Okay, we could have done it in a different way or in a better way." If you get that help in the very beginning, then you can avoid all that, and do a better design of the overall solution.

In terms of the users, it's basically an IT-supported application. We don't really have any direct business users. We have six or seven IT people who support the system. We have a team of four EDI analysts who mainly do all the EDI implementations and regular day-to-day support. We have an admin team, but we hardly use them. It's only during any restarts or any maintenance that we have to use them. On a day-to-day basis, we have a team of four people who actually provide support on the system.

Regarding extent of its use, as I mentioned earlier, we are using it mainly for EDI. We also do have some other tools in our company that we are currently using for application-to-application and business-to-business integration. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is mainly for EDI-related stuff.

In terms of usage, on a yearly basis, we have an objective where we try to increase the usage of EDI in our company. We reach out to our trading partners and a lot of our customers who are currently not sending documents through EDI. If they are sending orders, or we send invoices to them through, for example, email or fax or another manual method, we reach out to them and ask them if they have the capability so that we can onboard them into EDI. With that campaign, every year we are increasing the usage of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) by at least some 15 to 20 customers.

We have the on-premise solution. We have not used the Landscape Manager feature.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. As I mentioned, we are only using it for EDI. In terms of enterprise application integration, because we already had another tool, we don't even use that; I don't know where SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) stands in that. But in terms of EDI, it is a pretty good tool. If I were to just rate it for EDI, I would rate it a ten but, overall, because some of the capabilities that other tools provide, I give it an eight.

We use it mostly for data integration. We use a module from SEEBURGER called Managed File Transfer or MFT. We move about 30,000 to 50,000 files in a week in our company. The files are moved intracompany but they also move between our company and our external partners. We also have a bunch of stuff on Amazon. We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to integrate our data center with Amazon file transfers.

Before this product, we used to use a solution that required us to write code and then go through the process. It would take five to seven days for our development team to do the code, test it, and then promote it. The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) MFT solution is really configuration-driven. It comes with a number of adapters for file transfers. Some of these processes, which used to take five to seven days and cost an average of $5,000 per integration, can now be done in a couple of hours because of the configuration. And they cost less than $1,000 dollars overall. We are able to do faster delivery and it's much more robust, handling large files really well. And it does bring cost savings.

It is also flexible when it comes to adding integrations. We have created some frameworks and we are able to utilize those frameworks very quickly. The solution is really handy in those terms. For example, when we bought the product, we had a requirement for transferring data to Amazon S3 buckets but we did not have a solution in our shop for large data transfers to Amazon S3. We worked with SEEBURGER and created a framework solution and now, using that solution, we can configure the transfer in an hour or two and enable it to go to existing or new S3 buckets. It's a tremendously powerful solution and it gives us a lot of leverage to get things done quickly.

It's a very robust solution and it's very configurable. Before this product we would use an ESB-type of solution which required us to write code and go through a process. We can configure the SEEBURGER solution much more easily, instead of writing code. It does its job very well, to the extent that we do not see failures in the system. It can handle large files very well, which is one of our bigger concerns. We transfer some bank files up to ten gigs in size and it handles them really well.

Larger loads can be handled either by Active-Active or Active-Passive. The Active-Active definitely provides high up-times so if one of our nodes goes down, the other nodes still continue to work and we are not totally down. It meets our requirements for "five nines".

There's always room for improvement. One of them is that the product is not integrated very well with different cloud providers. We did work with the vendor to build a solution for Amazon, but there is no solution for other cloud providers like Google or Azure. The vendor needs to create adapters so that if we have a requirement to transfer data from our data center to another cloud, outside of Amazon, we would be able to do that. 

Another issue is that support for the vendor's operating system is not available. There used to be support for the older operating system over SMB, but they have discontinued the support. They need to come up with a solution to support the new Windows operating system.

It's a very stable solution. We do not see much of a problem with it. We may have to re-start the solution once a year at the most, but that's part of our regular maintenance cycle. The solution is very robust and stable.

I don't think the scalability of the solution is that great because they have tied the solution to their named nodes and it does not allow scalability like some of the cloud products.

We have the Premium Support and we pay extra for that, and it gives us access to their engineers. It also requires the vendor to respond within three hours, if we create a Severity 1 ticket. But we have not had many problems.

We switched mostly because of efficiency and cost reasons. Our previous solution required a lot more development and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is a much more configuration-driven solution.

It is a complicated solution, it was not a straightforward setup. We leveraged their Professional Services to help us understand and architect the solutions. I do see a lot of room for improvement there, because the solution and the documentation are not very intuitive. There's a lot that could be done there. It's not like you're installing one product, it's a number of products that you have to install and configure. And there are always chances of failure. There's a lot of room for improvement.

From when we bought the product to when we took the first product live, it took us about four months. But after the infrastructure was set up it was much easier.

A lot of the third-party service providers did not have knowledge of this product. We use Accenture as our core SME but they did not have knowledge of, or skillsets in, this product. We had to work with the vendor, hire their Professional Services to do the architecture, do the installation, and to train our engineers on the solution. There was a lot of learning curve there and we spent a lot of time and money with SEEBURGER Professional Services to get to that point.

We have seen return of investment in terms of how quickly we can deliver.

It has a very goofy pricing model in the sense that they have so many components and it's not very clear what components you require to do your work. When you ask for that, you learn that there's a surcharge for them. It's not that you buy a product and you can use all the compatibilities. They have all these different bits and pieces of it and you have to pay extra for all those things.

We did a big PoC. We narrowed it down to three or four vendors and we invited all of them to come on site and demonstrate their products. We gave them a use-case scenario to implement and, based on that, we made our selection.

The only advice I would give is to see that the industry is moving towards the cloud and this solution is an on-prem solution. The vendor does not have a cloud offering, at least not that we're aware of. So evaluate a solution based on your needs.

Right now, we are deployed on-premise and we are migrating it into the cloud.

The product is being used quite a bit and it's meeting all of our needs for file transfers at this point. We are not expecting to increase usage at this point in time. We are looking to the vendor for the cloud migration and, as part of that, we may have to add more cores. The cloud architecture is different than our on-prem architecture so we may have to make architectural adjustments to allow "five nines," and that might force us to buy some additional licensing.

We do not use Landscape Manager, we only use the base solution, the Business Integration Suite. We mostly focus on the Manage File Transfer part.

We do not have any business users using the solution, it is an IT solution. We do have support teams that are the users of the solution and they're supporting and monitoring the processes. We also have a number of software engineers who are configuring processes to take the files and move the files. There are about ten people who provide support for these things, so they have access to it, along with our system administrators and engineers.

Our system administrator is responsible for running the system, upkeep, and making sure that the servers are patched and everything is working. We have a couple of engineers or developers who are using it. Right now, we are turning around about five to eight projects in a month. The developers work on some of these configurations and provide testing. It's a very small staff.

I give the solution a seven out of ten because it's a very robust product and it works well, but architecture-wise it's complicated.

We use the product to process for our EDI/B2B platform. It supports various transaction formats including X12, EDIFACT, cXML and xCBL. We also use the product to handle various communication protocols, including AS2, FTP, HTTP and PGP encryption.

The product has the ability to handle high volumes of data efficiently. The front-end has provided us the ability to see issues quickly and is enabled for quick and easy remediation.

• It's hard to single out a single feature. The product has some wonderful aspects to it.
• Mapping Designer provides excellent flexibility.
• BIS front-end provides high visibility.
• IDoc Connector provides seamless connection to our SAP system.

The ability to bind a mapping to an agreement seems a bit clunky. It would be nice to have a better way of navigating to a map name rather than using a drop down list.

It is very stable. It has 99.9 percent uptime.

It is highly scalable.

Technical support has been varied through the years. As SEEBURGER has grown, they have made changes to the tech support area which can be challenging at times. There is room for improvement here, but SEEBURGER is moving in the right direction.

We used the TrustedLink Enterprise (TLE) solution. We switched because the product did not provide all the features that we needed to grow our eCommerce platform. The SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) was one of a few which provided translation for various formats, communications, and integration into SAP, all under one hood.

The initial set up was done by SEEBURGER consulting. It can be complex due to various factors, such as server settings, database settings, and security settings. 

Having the SEEBURGER consulting team perform the installation alleviates a lot of headaches and ensures a stable system.

We have seen ROI.

The cost of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) can be considered high. We have elected to have SEEBURGER consulting do the installation. Licensing could also be considered high. However, one would be hard pressed to find another product that does all that this one does.

We evaluated the Gentran's AI (Application Integrator).

Overall, its an excellent product. I would highly recommend it.

The company has been using the solution for three years now. I have been onboard for one year.

We are using the managed services, which is cloud-based, and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) manages this part for us. We do have a modified or hybrid managed services model. We do our own mapping internally, but everything else is through the cloud and SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) services.

SEEBURGER is a global company who offers a presence not only in the United States, but is also international across the globe. They offer world-class services, a 24/7 support model, and managed services.

We are at about 95 percent of a million files a month SLA. We have 99.9 percent uptime with it. We have a pretty good response with it, normally under four hours, and that is if there is an issue at all.

The platform has been very consistent and responsive.

We haven't had any issues with it. I've worked very hard to address any gaps which were in place when I came onboard. Therefore, we have been pleased with it.

The platform, Business Integration Suite (BIS), is a multi-component platform which offers more than just ADI. It has components with WebEDI, manages file transfer, and some other areas as well. We've been able to have a high volume system, though probably not as high volume as some of the eCommerce organizations, but we're getting up there. 

It is flexible when adding integrations. We have a cloud-based service. When adding integrations, it is a single point of access. Therefore, we are looking at expanding and using additional functionality with their BIS platform. I don't foresee any additional issues with this. It is just working out the connectivity with the integration points. We are going an SAP implementation with the next version of their portal, which will need some connectivity and functionality as well.

Their traditional model is a vendor flow. We are looking to do a customer-based flow, which which require significant development from SEEBURGER. We are working with them to do this using their WebEDI. It is a brand new area for them, but it could be an option in the future.

The stability is world-class. It is as good as any of the other options out there. They have addressed hiccups quickly, professionally, and with an excellent response.

The scalability is world-class. We are pretty high-end and have a good deal of throughput second. 

We have a lean team using the platform, as we have under six using it now. We do have a European presence as well, which is currently under discussion. We are probably molding to a single global team at this point.

Technical support team's response time is excellent. I have had no complaints.

The company was using an IBM platform.

It was the next step away (replacement) from the previous ADI platform that we were using. While I was not onboard at that time, from what I understand, an extensive review was done, not only with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but with other platforms which they were using with IBM in-house models. The result of that review, including testing, was that they decided and settled on SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS).

SEEBURGER did the mapping development and all the setup. If I been onboard at that time, I probably would've managed it differently so the team would have received a bit more experience. However, there were some time-sensitive project deadlines and project metrics involved with it, so they were able to leverage SEEBURGER's expertise and consulting services in getting maps from the previous platform over and developed. Now, I don't know exactly the time frame for it, but I didn't hear any negative feedback, so I would say it went seamlessly.

For deployment and maintenance, our company runs very lean. We run with a team of about three. This will probably change, but right now everybody sort of does everything.

I did a review of other options out there, as we moved into the future and our SAP implementation, that this would be the right solution. It was very comparable to other manage services out there. Thus, there wasn't any clear-cut reason to go in another direction.

I've been onboard a year now. I revisited our review of competing platforms. All of them had their pluses and minuses. It came down to dollars and cents, especially when we are about to start an SAP implementation.

We plan to increase platform usage by 25 to 30 percent over the next six to 12 months. This does not even include the WebEDI, which would probably add another 25 percent.

We are not utilizing the Business Integration Suite (BIS) platform to its fullest capacity and functionality. 

This is just to transfer files securely within the Mylan network, and a few instances from the outside too. It is just to transfer files. Like a postman, it moves the files between the systems with no data transformation

We have the on-premise solution and are only using one feature of this product. Most of our solutions are on-premise, as our security team prefers it that way.

It used to take half an hour to move one file from one location to another. Now, it takes 10 minutes. 

We did not procure this software as a reason to improve our organization. We procured this software to replace the existing one.

We have found this tool useful.

The solution is flexible when it comes to adding integrations. It is much easier to use than the other tools we have to move the files. Across the board, we can move files in a short amount of time compared to our other existing tools.

It is stable. We haven't faced any major issues since the implementation of this software.

From what I understand, scalability is much easier. However, we haven't increased our volumes or interfaces. We are still only using 20 to 30 percent. We are far away from any increase or decrease of the system sizes.

Our users are mostly the technical team. We have five to seven people using the system. It is the technical team only, not the end-users, and most of them are IT engineers.

We have more than 300 interfaces in this platform.

We have only requested technical support a couple of times. We haven't faced any issues with them. They are very good.

We procured this software to replace webMethods. 

The initial setup is not the straightforward. It took couple of months for us to set up.

We had planned to do it in a month and migrate all the file transfer interfaces into this new platform, but it took us two months for installation, then another two months to move the interfaces. It may not be a software issue, because there are so many other factors, e.g., resources, dealing with partners, etc.

We accepted the help of the SEEBURGER team, making it a typical software setup and installation process.

We have seen ROI.

The pricing and licensing is very competitive.

We evaluated SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) and a couple of other tools. We found SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) to be better suited for our organization.

The Active-Active helps handle larger loads without time delays.

Our reaction time has changed by 50% since implementing this solution.

There are so many moving components. Even if it is on-premise, some servers need to be on the DMZ and some need to be inside of the firewall, so working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) made it easier.