The initial setup is complex. 

Patching or upgrading the product is a bit of a nightmare. It would be nice if they removed the installation manager port. We find it complicates upgrading and patching a great deal. The installation manager is supposed to make things easier, but it actually makes it a lot worse.

The one thing that is lacking is easy visibility. It's hard to provide business users with a view into the statuses of their transactions.

The EDI translation mapping could be more simplified with more templates.

API integration could be improved. The legacy system could be on the cloud.

There are a couple of areas in the solution which could be improved. When dealing with huge flows, the solution lags, causing issues in its speed. There are also some features in the solution that are not user-friendly, like code lists with no search options. So, we must navigate hundreds of pages to check for one entry. In a few areas, the solution lacks user-friendliness.

It would be helpful if the dashboard could be integrated and possibly bundled by the product vendor. It currently comes as a separate package.

IBM B2B Integrator could improve the business process itself, there is no resignation of duties and in terms of the console should be changed in a way that is more user-friendly.

The web interface of B2B is quite ancient and not particularly user-friendly. It's quite difficult to navigate within the dashboard of the product and understand the features. Whenever they bring out a new version, the new features are not documented for the first month although they are visible. I can try using them but it's really not possible without the documentation which really needs to be provided in tandem with the new features. Additional features I'd like to see are the integration of some external tools for API management. IBM has a lot of such tools and some could easily be integrated.

With the most recent releases of this product, the installation and administration have become much more complex.

After SI v5.2.4 there are major changes happened to the product with some new features and capabilities., which in turn are good. With features like advance communication, High Availability etc. installation and management of the tool has become little complex. Introduction of installation manager was not a conventional method of B2Bi installation. Everything comes with the price. If you want your infrastructure to be up to date and available all the time, Complexity is something you have to take up with it.

I would like to see that more simplified for the users.

Better integration with other IBM products is definitely the main piece with room for improvement.

I think probably the envelope setups are a little complicated and cumbersome. There are a lot of pages to go through. I know there's ITXA, a new product that came out that should help with that but maybe they can use some of that knowledge from ITXA and put it into the existing BDBI setup.

Maybe also the navigation part could be a little easier, when trying to track documents.

I would like more visibility, because IBM has partnered with other companies that sell frameworks. So I thought if IBM can invest more on providing that visibility, having us install a third-party framework, would be a nice feature that IBM could seriously think about.

The breadth of APIs is something that I would like to see improved. At a recent IBM conference, I was going to a hands-on lab about the APIs and the Sterling solution, and I would love to see them expand upon that. We use IBM Control Center and they have a lot of work to do with their APIs. You can't make a single call to get all the information you want on a file status, on a transfer status. I would love to see them improve both in their IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, File Gateway, and control center, the use of APIs and I guess the options that you can have with them.

One of the top most features that is missing is the integration with the ASPERA FASP protocol for us, which is still missing on the B2B Integrator. IBM bought ASPERA a few years back but haven't been able to provide this protocol integration with their B2B file gateway. However, the same is now integrated with ‎Connect:Direct for a standalone solution but not on the Connect:Direct adapter within Sterling Integrator.

So, that's the primary one. There are just a few missing aspects in terms of the integration; otherwise, the product is good. It's pretty scalable. It's pretty easy to use once the install is done. It has a user interface, which is great. So, everything except a few challenges on the new integration. That's it.

The current trend is to have data integration, hybrid cloud integration, and microservices with further API monetization. The solution needs to ensure that it has all these capabilities in order to properly satisfy a customer's needs. 

The solution definitely needs that gateway security, where all messages need to be secured, from the security point of view. 

They do not have a solid partner ecosystem, and they do not have a clear roadmap for down the line; they're missing that clear roadmap.

They do not have proper documentation of legal requirements so that a partner or a customer can quickly learn and get familiar with it. IBM needs to do a better job of supplying these details.

There is no end-to-end built in visibility at least until we moved to IBM managed services.

Able to test processes in debug mode.

Able to test processes from local machines.

Ciphers: Security around ciphers and handling the changes within that industry could use improvement. They could make it easier to enable and remove ciphers that you don't want to use or that have been deprecated, etc.

The user interface is outdated. B2B Integrator was developed in the United States in the nineties, and the graphical user interface hasn't improved since. It's tough because you have to program the software in XML. Nowadays, other methods are easier to work with. Programming the system is challenging. However, it's not a shortcoming for me. I think it would help if they had more documentation, too. 

There's a lot still to be improved in the component, as there are many challenges in terms of B2B tools. One of the challenges was on the Sterling side, since I love to have translations with XLS. So, if you have a Word document and an XLS file, then there is no conversion right now, which is a standard way of doing it. It's not happening anywhere in the world, i.e., anywhere in the B2B tools, so I'd love to have that kind feature soon.

Well perhaps an easier way of getting questions answered would be useful. The emailing of questions into IBM's site for Sterling support works but it would be nicer if we had more. The knowledge base does leave a little bit to be expected.

I don't see that it needs anything more. It does everything just the way it is right now. There is a lot of years of development back from when Sterling was an independent company, before IBM took over. They formed a niche and we have it.

There have been a couple of issues that we have raised in terms of scalability and high availability. IBM has responded back with the next-generation product and new features like the global mailbox and a couple of other things, which are pretty cool. We would like to use the same product without having to go for the add-on products.

It's a very good solution, but there's also room for improvement to make it easier and a little more user friendly. It's still more of a toolbox in a way. It's got a lot of components that you have to configure, which is great because it gives you extreme flexibility, but that also adds a level of complexity to it.

We could use templates and some shortcuts that would help users get up and running quicker and give them confidence in the solution.

Visibility and reporting is lacking. There are some default reporting capabilities such that we wouldn't have to build, for example, error reports, or bundling up. It should be more user friendly.

Also some pre-built, typical B2B business processes would be good, instead of having to build them out; I'd rather have some templates that we could use and modify.

The challenge is there is no related transaction stored in the database because it's an OLTP application.

There are a couple of issues which could be improved. One is the outcome of the ITXA integration on installation. We need better visibility around code lists. There is the handling of code lists and API calls to support partial update of any interfaces, training partner management, all of which is not there today. Their integration with ICCs is only limited to ADI, but it should be open for other formats.

Also, there should be a single place to do things, rather than making it complicated, not moving away and truncating the old features but instead coming up with the new and still keeping the old stuff confuses people sometimes. I think that's pretty much what I would like to say.

From my perspective and as per what I know, it needs more hardening of the environment and they need to make sure that there is less unscheduled downtime. 

It does solve our issues and problems. However, the main issue is around uptime and they should do as much as they can, so as to correct anything in regards to that.

A more deeper monitoring system for the product itself is required. Right now, we do use the IBM Control Center for monitoring, which is another IBM monitoring product, but it would be better if they can provide an easy-to-use interface for monitoring purposes.

The interface is too detailed, i.e., if you want to give it to the help desk to just monitor, it doesn't give you a yes / no option nor does it give an alert / no alert option. It just gives too much details for everything. It requires too much customization that we need to do, so as to make the product work to its best.

It is a pretty good product but still a lot of customization is required for each and everything that we do. It gives you a lot of flexibility for a new IT person. However, he has to learn a lot of different ways; it's not just in one way you can configure the product, i.e., the way most of the Microsoft products or any other products would be. That's the only way you can do it. IBM does give you the option to customize in a lot of different ways, which is good, but for new people getting in there, it involves too much learning.

I think it needs some additional things like visibility. That's why we look to partners who provide that kind of visibility and I think that's something that could be changed. The product is stable but I think there are some things that they can do to enhance it, to make it a little bit more stable in terms of visibility of transactions.

Sterling B2B Integrator is a transactional tool to manage the flow of EDI centric transactions to and from your trading partners. It also works with an add-on product called ITX Advanced (ITXA).

As transactions flow through, the users would like to see the status if each of the transactions, or an analytic view of a number of transactions. For example, a user might say “tell me how many EDI claims failed validation today or this week?” Or how much order volume in terms of dollars was processed today?

I had that request from a VP of Sales when I was an EDI Coordinator. He would come by every day and ask “have we hit $1M yet in orders today?” He was not technical, and wouldn’t be able to run queries on a database, for example, so if the tool could give a dashboard with the transaction totals, both in physical transactions (i.e. 15,783 POs today) as well as business level information (those PO’s totaled $1.3M in orders, or $450,883 for product A, and $78,932 for product B, etc.), that would be valuable to business users.

Some of IBM’s partners, like Lightwell and CoEnterprise, have been building these dashboards as part of their offering as they have seen a gap in the IBM product.

For example, CoEnterprise offers a solution called Syncrofy to do this.

You'd have to contact my technical team to get any detail on room for improvement. I think, really, the ideal is what it's capabilities are right now.

I would like to see the implementation of APIs into the solution mix. They are already working on this. I would like to see more capabilities to understand how easily APIs can connect and how they can be integrated with the existing B2B suite.

The improvements that need to be made are mostly little things.

The Extended Rule windows in the mapper only have two settings: small window or full screen. When working on an elaborate rule, I end up creating it in notepad and then pasting it into the Extended Rule window, which is not convenient.

Sterling cognitive analytics is a big thing. If they can do that, that will be great.

• API-Fication required, and there should be more clarity on their cloud migration strategy.
• Map translator needs more enhancements.
• End-to-end visibility and monitoring application required. The control center is available and covers this area, but it still fails in many monitoring scenarios.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reporting features could be better. right now, they are lacking a bit.

In the future, we would like to see daily reporting capabilities and improvements in the dashboards.

The tool requires you to write a lot of code in Java and XSLT, which makes development tough. There are other tools such as Dell Boomi that do not need as much coding.

The initial setup can be made a little easier.

Support for microservices is somewhat lacking.