SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite Reviews

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.

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.

We use it for our EDI. 

It's primarily for receiving orders from some of our customers and we then issue invoices to those customers via EDI. We also dialogue with our logistics companies who will be shipping the orders to the customers. We send messages to our logistics companies telling them about new products or batch changes or an order which needs to be sent out to this customer by that date. That logistics company will then confirm back to us when they've done so and that kicks off another process, which is the invoice. It's end-to-end in a lot of ways.

It routes electronic messaging from other companies. The benefit of that is that there's no human intervention, so there is less opportunity for errors. That's in contrast to receiving something by fax and entering it. Here, it's going straight into your system.

SEEBURGER has all the maps for a lot of our customers, a relationship with many of them already. So the onboarding is relatively easy. That helps a lot.

We use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) for getting orders from our customers, sending invoices out, and to have a dialogue with our warehouses. Using EDI means that there are more system-to-system interactions. That means that the people in our offices have more time to do more value-added activities, rather than just entering orders into the system.

We don't use it so that we can reduce headcount. It's more about being more efficient, adding more value to the business. Rather than sitting there mindlessly entering in orders, that is done automatically so we can use the resources elsewhere.

In terms of onboarding our new customers to create an EDI relationship, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is generally very good.

It just works. We get a monthly report from them so we can see how it's all operating. I keep an eye on that report, but it's just on a very high level. If there's any failure, we usually get some kind of email communication from them saying, "We had this downtime, some messages might not get through." We also have a portal that we can look at to see if our messages have transmitted successfully and been received successfully. We have people monitoring our messages and if there's anything that has failed then they're looking into why.

Our customers send us orders by EDI. When orders come in they go into our ERP system directly, so there is integration there.

Another very good feature is that when they're doing proactive maintenance, they always give us a lot of notice.

There might be some improvements they could make to the portal, but they're not anything that stops me from working.

It doesn't happen that often at all, but occasionally we get a message, such as this one from a few weeks ago: "SEEBURGER Cloud and Managed Services operation team has recognized a critical incident, which delayed the message processing within the SEEBURGER Cloud Service. We are handling this as Priority-One." But this was the first such message in a very long time.

I don't think there's a stability problem. I really don't tend to get many issues. The agreement we have with them is 99.5 percent uptime.

At the moment, it's doing what we want it to do. Going forward, once we start looking at our future, we might think about other things you might want to do with it. But at the moment it's serving our purposes.

We have hundreds of customers but we don't have EDI with hundreds of customers because those customers need to have the ability to do EDI too. 

EDI is a very good efficiency tool and there are always plans to increase its usage, but there's a cost involved with that. The cost isn't just the cost with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). There would potentially be changes to our ERP system. Each customer has its own requirements as well, so each onboarding of a customer is not a "vanilla" process or the same as it was with the previous customer.

Technical support is fine. We log a ticket and we get some kind of response back. It's different from what we used to have when we had a dedicated business partner who, if we had a problem, would be contacted first. They've changed their model in the last two or three years and there's now a service desk you contact and they handle it. It has gone from that very personal relationship to a more helpdesk-type of thing. And whilst that's not a massive issue if you've got all the backup of the paperwork and the history behind it, when we had that one dedicated person, that person knew pretty much everything about our system.

When I first joined, there was one business partner we dealt with regularly, and now it's that service desk. We have lost that personalization a little bit. There hasn't been a massive issue with having the service desk. And when there was that one, dedicated person, there would be a single point of failure. For example, if that person left then we'd lose all that knowledge anyway. So I understand what they're doing. But with a helpdesk, sometimes you have to explain a lot of things over and over again because they have different people dealing with different tickets.

While you might want that one person, you also need people with that technical background. The service desk provides that technical background. I understand where they're coming from, but I did enjoy that relationship and being able to pick up the phone to one person and say, "We're having this issue."

Return on investment for us on this is the greater efficiency.

There is a standard agreement for the messaging every month. But if we make a change request — a change to a mapping or something like that — then there is a fixed price per hour. We get the quotes for those types of things from the service desk. We would then approve that quote before they started any work.

My advice would be to do it. But do not underestimate the time it will take to implement it. Just because SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) may have a map with a customer, it's not a, "Yep, switch it on," and it will automatically link up. When I first started working with EDI I had no clue about it. People said, "Yeah, it's fine. It works like this." But I hit a lot of stumbling blocks, primarily because what you have to do to satisfy your internal requirements and regulations may not match up with other companies' requirements. 

We are pharmaceutical company so we have to have a lot of testing, a lot of evidence, to prove that the messages we sent are received in the way we want them to be received. Whereas for some other companies, they just want to do one test and go live with it. So my advice is to be patient and try and work through all the stumbling blocks. It's not as easy as people think, but it can be done. Once it's done, it's easy, once you've gone live.

The biggest thing we've learned is that there are not many barriers to using it. Persevere with it. Although each customer is different, you can find a way around it. It might take some time, it might take some effort, but it can be done. That is the biggest lesson I've taken from it.

SEEBURGER was very helpful to me in bringing up my knowledge on this topic. I am grateful to them and they're always available. They are a good business partner for our company so, generally, I'm happy.

In terms of users, it's our IT department that monitors the EDI messages, so there are at least four or five people there who use SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). And we have the people who get involved with any projects related to EDI, so that might be another three or four people. And there are probably some people in our manufacturing department, maybe another 12 people, who are actually looking at the messages. But some of those people would not be looking at the messages in the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) portal. Only be the IT department does that. Other people look at the success or failure of messages in our ERP environment.

Regarding the fact that SEEBURGER invests a high proportion of revenue into R&D rather than promoting brand awareness, I don't really have any opinion on that. It's up to them, if that's what they want to do. For me, what's important is to make sure that my messages get through and there are no issues with my customers.

Overall, I would rate the solution at seven out of ten. We've lost a little bit of that personalization — someone who might know our business more. We're dealing with anybody in the service desk area. In terms of price, it's not massively cheaper. But I like that we've got an account manager. If I need to call him he's available. He gives me good information, so it's not like I've got no one to call. Overall, it does what it says on the box.

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 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.