Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Aug 8, 2025
Based on experience, the one area IBM can improve for Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is the support mechanism. While support is available 24/7 whenever required, the solution time during American hours can take longer. In general, during American hours, the resource availability is not up to the standard. However, availability of support staff during UK timings or GMT timings is very good; they are supportive and helpful. Functionality-wise, they can make additional improvements to Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct. They recently improved by adding a GUI for configurations on Windows as well as UNIX platforms, which is very helpful. However, the web client is cumbersome and not as interactive as it should be. The CLI part is comprehensive, but the GUI needs improvement.
Senior Professional engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Apr 25, 2025
I do not find anything that needs improvement in Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct as a product. I have been supporting this solution, and it serves billions of customers well. Capgemini, in collaboration with IBM, conducts comprehensive testing and R&D. However, a complex setup for clusters could be enhanced, though IBM provides support with it through their professional services team.
Senior Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 5
Sep 19, 2024
The package that IBM delivers does not come with many premade tools or templates. This means we have to create a lot of things by ourselves, which requires more work. We have a team of four to five people just to develop map-based programs. Additionally, the initial setup could be simpler and better.
The solution's licensing cost is too high. The resources required for this tool are costly and not easily available in the market. I have faced issues with the certificates. We get issues if our source and destination Connect:Direct nodes do not have the latest TLS 1.2. Installing the solution is quite difficult because only an experienced person can do it. Newcomers will not be able to configure the entire solution.
Systems Infrastructure Manager at Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank - Egypt
Real User
Mar 20, 2023
There is room for improvement in monitoring. We don't have good visibility tools and monitoring, so I believe there may be some enhancement needed in its monitoring dashboard.
Learn what your peers think about Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.
The user interface could be more user-friendly. The internal protocol for NEO file on file transfer could be improved because the user can sometimes find themselves lost.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct could improve by adding some of the functionality that some other vendors have. For example, GoAnywhere has call agents, which are small clients that can be installed on the endpoints and can be handled by the central point on the server. If I want to do this with the IBM solution, I have to sell a lot of account addresses. The price could be unprofitable for the customer. There is some small functionality that could be implemented and could be easily done to improve this solution.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jan 4, 2022
The product could be improved by making the user interface more user-friendly. Adding nodes, connections and managing the support is too complicated. Sterling Commerce ConnectDirect would be better if it had a reverse proxy integrated into the DMZ because usually the nodes are installed directly on secure sites internally. We need to put them through additional servers, which is not easy to do. If the product came with its own DMZ portion server it would be helpful.
Manager 3rd Party Application Support at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
May 12, 2021
The user interface needs to be improved. It's very rarely used. Technical support is difficult to work with. I would like to see more adapters created that allow other protocols to send to it.
IBM's Sterling Connect:Direct is a software product that offers security-hardened, point-to-point file transfers to reduce reliance on insecure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transmissions. It is designed for high-volume file distribution within and between businesses. The solution guarantees more reliable file movement, from batch integration and movement of large images or catalogs to synchronization with distant sites. Sterling Connect:Direct also enables hybrid cloud deployment through...
Based on experience, the one area IBM can improve for Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is the support mechanism. While support is available 24/7 whenever required, the solution time during American hours can take longer. In general, during American hours, the resource availability is not up to the standard. However, availability of support staff during UK timings or GMT timings is very good; they are supportive and helpful. Functionality-wise, they can make additional improvements to Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct. They recently improved by adding a GUI for configurations on Windows as well as UNIX platforms, which is very helpful. However, the web client is cumbersome and not as interactive as it should be. The CLI part is comprehensive, but the GUI needs improvement.
I do not find anything that needs improvement in Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct as a product. I have been supporting this solution, and it serves billions of customers well. Capgemini, in collaboration with IBM, conducts comprehensive testing and R&D. However, a complex setup for clusters could be enhanced, though IBM provides support with it through their professional services team.
I do not have any notes for improvement.
The package that IBM delivers does not come with many premade tools or templates. This means we have to create a lot of things by ourselves, which requires more work. We have a team of four to five people just to develop map-based programs. Additionally, the initial setup could be simpler and better.
The solution's licensing cost is too high. The resources required for this tool are costly and not easily available in the market. I have faced issues with the certificates. We get issues if our source and destination Connect:Direct nodes do not have the latest TLS 1.2. Installing the solution is quite difficult because only an experienced person can do it. Newcomers will not be able to configure the entire solution.
There is room for improvement in monitoring. We don't have good visibility tools and monitoring, so I believe there may be some enhancement needed in its monitoring dashboard.
This solution cannot be deployed on a root_squash NFS, which limits superuser privileges.
The user interface could be more user-friendly. The internal protocol for NEO file on file transfer could be improved because the user can sometimes find themselves lost.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct could improve by adding some of the functionality that some other vendors have. For example, GoAnywhere has call agents, which are small clients that can be installed on the endpoints and can be handled by the central point on the server. If I want to do this with the IBM solution, I have to sell a lot of account addresses. The price could be unprofitable for the customer. There is some small functionality that could be implemented and could be easily done to improve this solution.
The product could be improved by making the user interface more user-friendly. Adding nodes, connections and managing the support is too complicated. Sterling Commerce ConnectDirect would be better if it had a reverse proxy integrated into the DMZ because usually the nodes are installed directly on secure sites internally. We need to put them through additional servers, which is not easy to do. If the product came with its own DMZ portion server it would be helpful.
The user interface needs to be improved. It's very rarely used. Technical support is difficult to work with. I would like to see more adapters created that allow other protocols to send to it.