IBM FileNet Reviews

FileNet is a really robust and powerful tool for document management environments. It's very well designed, especially on the storage side, and also on the application server side. It's really powerful, robust, and highly available. In our environment, we store more than six billion documents. Some of these documents are more than 1,000 pages.

We also have other FileNet environments – FileNet Image Services environments – and we have federated these image services to a FileNet P8 environment, first as a federation. Then, we have successfully migrated all our old documents to the FileNet P8 environment without any demolition of the documents. It was a nice project.
Also, the elasticity of the APIs IBM provides us is powerful. We are also using IBM WebSphere as the application server. We are hosting our FileNet P8 services on top of WebSphere. It serves as a powerful tool.

Troubleshooting is very proactive. We can easily monitor the system, and we can easily define the problem and take action on it.

ECM is our heart on branches, for example if you cannot check the id and signature of the customer, you can do nothing. Also it’s very vital for us to predict how long does the the operation take for each customer. These makes stability as one of our major concerns Based on 9 years of experience with IBM ECM solutions; I can say that, the power of IBM products comes from stability predominantly. Both FileNet Image services and FileNet P8 are five-nines percent successful on this manner.

Document management is a new concept for some managers, and some kind of innovative concept, also. When you have content, when you get the documents, then you can fetch the data from that document. You can do analysis, business analysis, predictions with that data, especially in banks, mostly because of regulations.

We have buildings we use for physical documents. Some of them are photographs, images; some of them are computer output data; some formatted, some non-formatted. With FileNet, especially by creating our services for capturing solutions, we can easily store and analyze these documents through the FileNet environment. It's a huge benefit to us. Our response times are no more than 300 milliseconds. We have so many branches all around Turkey. Some of them are more than 500 kilometers away, and we have this response time also in those locations. It's also very fast, and for customer satisfaction, it's a nice feature for us.

It's a big tool. It's heavy, really heavy. Because of this, and with it being highly available and robust, it's not so easy to manage. It's not like the new, light technologies. You cannot stop it in seconds, stop and restart it in seconds. That takes minutes. This can be improved, I think.

For example, WebSphere has a new application server named Liberty, especially in the front-end layer, with so many new technologies. IBM is construing it with Content Navigator, but we might not use it. Both parts have options that can be developed.
Management is an issue because the tools are so complex.

We moved to P8 six years ago.

It's very stable; no downtime, especially in the daytime because there were some. Think about if you are in a branch, you're an officer, and there's a queue; they're waiting; and the system is down. That was happening beforehand, but now, it is available five-nines percentage, almost no downtime. Response times are very fast, and we are keeping track of the number of operations the clients have done, and those numbers have significantly increased.

Actually, high availability and scalability are related.

There is no longer a document limit. We can easily scale both the systems and storage areas, no problem, without any performance degradation, without any high-availability degradation. We can easily scale.

We have the AVP premium support. They are very fast for first response, and they are very productive providing right solution in the right time.

We were previously using FileNet Image Services. It was a natural progression to move to FileNet P8. It has direct interaction, with a CFS tool, content federation services tool. We can easily integrate it and migrate our documents without any problem.

We did the initial setup because we have experience, but we worked with IBM and our local partner on the design. For a WebSphere-experienced application administrator, initial setup is very straightforward and very fast; we did it without any issues.

We considered other vendors. There are two factors for us. We have so many documents, billions of documents. Performance is one of the hot topics; fitting into our environment, fitting into our architecture because our architecture is generally based on WebSphere. Also, it was easy to integrate with FileNet Image Services. These were our major concerns. On top of that, high availability is a really important feature for us. These were the reasons we chose FileNet P8.

The decision-making process took more than 3-4 months because we did all the PoCs. We did a stress test; we set up a small environment. It took more than 3-4 months.

We also considered building the whole solution in-house, and we are doing it for some type of documents; non-critical, but agile documents. Performance is the first concern for that. We are only using disk storage, and then a single interface before the storage. Without any sub-tiers, we can directly reach the document, but there are some concerns about security, backup, and high availability.

We are not considering replacing FileNet P8, but using that for different use cases.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are adapting new technologies, and being the leader. IBM is the leader in this area.

See the product on the road, so to speak. Set it up and do a PoC and see the architecture; see the design.

My rating for this product is because of the high availability, scalability, robustness, adaptability, being the leader in the sector. These are the major reasons. I have not given it a perfect rating because it is not suitable for smaller environments and it could offer more features for different use cases. Consider, for example, on the database side, there are non-SQL databases and SQL databases. The big one would be providing both SQL and non-SQL together in the same environment. P8 is robust and for the heavy side, that is OK, but for the light side, it is not. Maybe they can add a light environment; work in it can be better.

We are considering employing IBM in cloud, hybrid, or box solutions, but in Turkey, using cloud, especially if there is customer data in the environment, is restricted by regulations. It's not clear. If this issue is solved, we will seriously consider it, including in the document management environment; not a public cloud, but maybe a private cloud, also. We are waiting for these regulations for it, but we are considering the technology, so that we do not fall behind.

We have some mobile applications; we are also providing documents to mobile applications. Our clients can also scan and submit some types of documents. They are inserting some type of forms, for example, credit card application forms, through mobile devices, but it's our own solution, not IBM's Content Navigator or other solutions. Nonetheless, in the back end, we are using FileNet. For the front end, our architecture decision is to use our own native applications because it's easy to build and customize. For our needs now, it's the best solution. Maybe in the future, we don't know. Technology is rapidly changing. Maybe we won’t have to create everything ourselves or invent everything from scratch. Maybe a surprise will occur in technology and we can use it, but now, we are using our own solution.

There are new analytics and content management services that we are able to provide for our organization. We have our own solution on the content analysis side also. Our R&D department have developed a project. They are doing human-made documents. These are unformatted documents and free texts, sometimes handwritten; especially faxes, for example. They are fetching the data, doing ICR on faxes. With an NLP-like algorithm, they are deciding which document it is, which department should be responsible for it, and sending a task to that department. The analytic operation is done in our own environment.

Since we implemented FileNet, there are services that we're now able to provide better. Before FileNet P8, we had another document management system, FileNet Image Services. It had some pitfalls, including, for example, a number of documents limit. We have overcome this after implementing FileNet P8. Also, the response times severely decreased. There was no high availability; it was an active-passive cluster on Image Services. After FileNet P8, it is an active-active configuration. These are huge benefits in terms of high availability, and customer satisfaction, also.

The experiences of our internal and or external customers both have changed because we implemented FileNet. External customers generally use internet banking, mobile devices, etc. Before making the document management environment highly available, we couldn't provide, for example, credit card statements as a document to the clients. We were only providing data, and they could see their statements, for example, for only the previous six months, not earlier. They were only seeing the data, not the exact statement I sent them. Now, we are providing exact statements. They see everything in it. They see the benefits we provide with this statement also. Yeah, that's a huge benefit for the clients. Even if it's more than 10 years ago, they can see that statement. For example, sometimes they can need it for legal issues.
Also, for our internal clients, there is no downtime and fast response.

As far as the usability of FileNet, our customers don't have any direct interaction with FileNet. We have our own applications. They don't see FileNet; any FileNet screens. They only see the document.

The people actually using FileNet, they only feel the response time and availability. That's easy and strong for them.

We use FileNet as an enterprise content management storage for our underwriting policies and our claims documents. The major products of FileNet that we use are Content Manager and ICC for SAP.

It's very robust. It's very good at document retrieval and storage, as well. The solution that we deployed is really good and it works fine.

FileNet provides secured facilities, which helps a lot.

A few products that we use in FileNet that really help our organization a lot. For example, Capture Pro and ICC are the important products that we use. They save us a lot of time.

We also use Image Services, which is another strong product from IBM. That also has a lot of features. It helps a lot to do annotations and then print services. The other features on that are excellent.

My thought process is that, we use a lot of FileNet products, and with the new versions that come from IBM, we were expecting IBM to provide some extended support for the products that we use at the customer's level. To make sure when we go to upgrade, we should have enough time to do any kind of upgrades or migrations.

I attended an IBM World of Watson conference to find out what new products they have. For example, we need more data analytics than we have now.

Some days, stability’s really good, especially with the product running with AIX and DB2. We have never had any bad experiences; it runs very well along with that operating system and that database.

For scalability, we have a load balancer and the AIX systems, which really help us to handle the volume and the user input also.

Technical support is 10/10.

It has been there for many years; they've been using it in our organization for more than 12-13 years.

They have been using a few products, but definitely the features and because it is an IBM product. We are basically an IBM shop, so we just prefer to use IBM products. That's why we are moving towards going to the ECM solutions from IBM.

Over time, initial setup has become more simple. Initially, with previous versions, it was harder. Now, it's getting very simple, because IBM has come up with a new hardware architecture, which helps a lot to simplify upgrades and installations.

They do have SharePoint for a few applications, but that doesn't really solve what the business needs. IBM FileNet is the right solution and we are currently using it. We'll be adding more features and more products into it to make it better for our customers.
We also have custom developments on top of FileNet.

The decision-making process takes about 6 months. We have a process to be followed. It takes a minimum of about 6 months to go through all the approvals; the business as well as our directors have to approve it.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is most likely the complexity. When there's any kind of situation with any architecture being introduced, that's when we need to have IBM or anyone to be involved directly to help us out.

Depending on the business needs, I would suggest FileNet and the architecture, as well as the features that it has. I would definitely recommend it.

According to my experience, over time, it has become perfect. The early versions had a lot of issues. It was running on different platforms, which had some issues. We had terrible outages in a back in 2008-2009. Over time, the new version upgrades really helped out a lot. With the current versions that we use, it's really great.

We are considering using IBM cloud, hybrid and box solutions. Those are leading features that IBM is coming up with. We definitely look forward to utilizing those products in the future.

We have a few analytical products, Hadoop and a few other products. They be working with a different group of teams, so they are definitely looking forward into it.
There aren’t really any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before.

We do not have any plans to include mobile at this moment.

Most of our customers are in Dunwoody and external customers only use very few applications. We provide external login access to them, which helps a lot. We mainly now use FileNet to store the policy documents and the underwriting and claims documents. From a retrieval point of view, it's very fast. The security is very good.

We have about 6,000-8,000 users and there are no complaints from the usability perspective. With some other products, such as Case Manager, when the new thing comes out, we need to make sure that the users are comfortable using it. Then, we look forward to switching to that.

FileNet P8 Content Manager is the primary platform we use. We use it essentially just as a document repository. We don't currently do any business process with it. We use it purely for storing and retrieving documents. The most important features would be the flexibility in which it can store the metadata, the flexibility in which you can search on the metadata and the scalability.

We have millions and millions and millions of documents and we have to put them somewhere. That is where they get put. A user can go to the FileNet system and pull up a document within a matter of seconds. Rather than, if you had no ECM system, you would send a request somewhere, someone would walk through old paper files somewhere and you would get your file in a day. That was thirty years ago. I don't think anyone does that now.

The particular aspect that I would like for us to improve on is the ingestion of new documents to data capture. We're looking at ways to more automate our document capture, more automated categorization of documents.

We were looking at the Datacap product. We're currently using Kofax. We're looking at Datacap to see if that might do it better. We don't know the answer to that yet.

It does what it's supposed to do well: you start a document on it; it pulls the document back; it displays the document. For what we use it for, I can't think of features that it's lacking. Now, there are other aspects of it that we don't use. There's a whole BPM system that's tied into it that we've never used.

Going back to data capture, that is not part of the FileNet P8 system. You have to have something to pull the documents in. IBM’s solution is called Datacap. Cofax is another company who we've been using. I went to a recent IBM conference hoping that they had the Datacap products smarter; all the talk there was about Watson and how smart it is. They have a new version of Datacap called Datacap Insight Edition. I was hoping that it was actually really smart; you could give it a bunch of documents, it could understand what the documents are, sort them out for us and extract relevant information. It's not there yet. The hype exceeds the reality.

At first, the customer experience was pretty rocky. A lot of that is just because when you give them something new, they liked the old thing. You give them something new and there's some good features and some bad features, but they're only going to complain about the bad stuff.

From an internal point of view, we had some big improvements in maintenance. The access management – the customer account management – moved from being entirely separate management on the old system to something that was integrated with our Active Directory system. Requests for passive resets and so on went from 100 per day down to zero.

We've standardized on an HTML 5-based viewer. We’ve gotten over some of the problems with being reliant on Java installed in all the various browsers. Functionally, the end customer experience is about the same. It looks a little bit different but there have been a lot of improvements in reduced maintenance costs and trouble.

It's been rock solid. Once you get it going and you get over the initial hump of the initial installation, it's solid.

Scalability is good.

FileNet tech support is wonderful. Sometimes, they prioritize according to whether the issue is a casual question or an emergency? If it's an emergency, they're right there; they'll have somebody there. They will get it fixed. If you ask them a low-priority question, it might take a while, but it's a low-priority question.

Also, once you find a document on their website, it's generally very good. The problem I've always had is that their website is sometimes horrible to find things on.

Our FileNet P8 system is an upgrade from an older FileNet Image Services system, which we've had for 14 years, I think. We're trying to obsolete that. Everything we're doing on the P8 system is really a mirror of the old Image Services system. We really haven't got around to trying implementing anything new yet.

I was involved in the decision to upgrade to the FileNet P8 system; I've been pushing for ten years.

FileNet P8 system installation is complex. I don't know how complex it is to similar products but it is definitely complex. It's not something you want to do unless you're an expert in it. You want to make sure you have somebody that knows how to do it.

I was not involved in any comparison to any other system. I don't know exactly what was done. I'm a lowly developer. I can't really compare the FileNet P8 system against any of its competitors.

When I’m selecting a vendor to work with, the most important criteria for me are: that they're going to exist in the future; their product is good; and their documentation is good. I like to be able to go out, find the documentation, and have it be nicely organized; I can find what I want; I can read about what I need to read about and do a deep dive into the nitty gritty details.

It is not my position to consider employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. There's been some conversation about what would be the economic benefit of having stuff moved to the cloud versus hosting it internally. The conversation has only been, “I wonder what the numbers are.” We don't know.

There are no plans of doing mobile in relation to the FileNet P8 system. The FileNet P8 system we use is entirely internal. There are no external, customer-facing applications. There are other departments that do mobile applications. We're a bank, so they have the bank mobile application. They do some FileNet documents but they call an ESB service, which then calls FileNet. We don't do anything directly with it.

I have no complaints regarding the usability of FileNet. I've seen other similar systems and it's comparable. It's kind of boring stuff: you pull up a screen; you put in some query conditions; you find some documents and you look at your documents. It's nothing exciting.

We use FileNet to store all the medical records and information for a patient. 

We have business users utilizing it in the whole organization for medical records.

I work in information systems now. However, regarding the emergency medical records, research, and other parts of the organization, FileNet lets us have all these records maintained smartly and securely. Mostly, we can use this information in the future for research, if we ever want into AI solution or if we wanted to look for new ways to look at cancer, then it is all there.

The solution provides ease of access. It has affected the decision-making in our organization.

FileNet lets us store everything there for compliance. There is something legally about us not being able to delete stuff. 

The taxonomy is its most valuable feature. Everything is hierarchical and has properties.

I am doing practical coding. Therefore, I am very happy that they have extensive Redbooks and demos with the FileNet API.

It is really usable. There is a lot of support for it. You have the online components to trawl through the storage. I have a lot of fun with it.

I did hear that maybe there are some errors in relationship to another product that they offer, like SmartLock. There is something going on there which is not good.

It is stable.

It is scalale.

There are a lot of Redbooks, and there is the IBM knowledge that is sent there. There are some more obscure errors that get thrown when I'm coding, because I'm bad. 

All in all, the tech support is really good. They have a lot of support.

We were using image services. Now, we are migrating to FileNet. Therefore, we are storing patient records, so they can be used in research.

I know it took them seven months to convert, so the initial setup was, probably to some degree, complex.

We used enChoice for the deployment. Our experience with them was good.

It has reduced operating costs. We went from paper to image services to FileNet. We did that because it was cheaper and better.

The solution has saved us time.

I would recommend choosing IBM. Go for it. It is not like there is a better alternative.

The automation that we are doing right now is to check that all our systems are up and working. I wrote a program in C# which touches a whole bunch of boxes and services. It does a whole bunch of actions against FileNet that checks everything is going correctly. It saves us time and effort, and it works.

I know that they're releasing FileNet 5.5.3 at the end of the month, but I don't know what is in it.

It runs our document management and workflow systems.

We have been able to grow the product and its use through a large number of business areas.

Overall, it has worked well for our business partners and various user groups. We have done some customization from a customer interface standpoint. Usability-wise, it has worked out well for us.

It is utilized by business users in our organization. We have done a lot of customization. We use the product more probably as a back-end delivery mechanism, but that has worked out well for our business people.

We have made our service routes more efficient, as far as moving work through the system and being able to react to customer situations and needs better by improving things, such as, address and beneficiary changes. I know that we have definitely made improvements in the process.

There are regulations on the amount of time that you have to process certain transactions. We have been able to knock that SLA down significantly with some of the products that we have implemented.

We have stuck with the product and sort of expanded on it. It's firmly entrenched in what we do (with legacy and new work).

• Reliability
• Speed
• Extensibility

Some of the user interface stuff might be a little more complicated than it needs to be: the native user interface. However, we traditionally develop our own UI.

From a business resiliency standpoint, it has worked out well for us.

We have seen an improvement from some older products to the P8 version now, from a stability standpoint

It has scaled well based off the user community that we have.

If I had a concern, it would be that we are sometimes not getting to the root cause of the issues from a technical standpoint as quickly as we should. For the most part, it's good. However, when things get a bit dicey with more involved issues, we have had some delays in getting feedback. If I had a concern, it's around the technical support and their responses in regards to things like root cause analysis.

Prior to implementing the first version of FileNet P8, our customer service organization was totally paper-based. They were dropping stacks of service requests on people's desks, and people working directly off of paper. Since implementing FileNet, we have been able to use it as a type of a distribution mechanism. This cuts out the paper process, and we now have the ability to distribute and move work through multiple steps in a business process.

The old process was going around distributing paper, then moving that stack from desk to desk. The advantage of running FileNet is that we've been able to capture the documents at the point of entry. We have been able to distribute work, then based on rules that we have set up in the workflow, route that work to the appropriate people at the appropriate time.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. As we have grown the environment and done certain things, it has gotten more complex. However, my experience has been okay. With the newer versions, because of our environments have grown, it has become a bit more complex.

We have done some homegrown development. We have used a couple partners to help with some development. We have used IBM resources to help install the original base product. Therefore, we have soft of had a mixed bag in all the deployment experiences. For the most part, they have been pretty good.

We have probably cut out at least 40 percent of what the work process was by easing out that whole distribution of paper.

It serves our needs, and it is performing as expected. It does what we expect out of it. Overall, it is a very good product for what we need in the company.

We do some basic integration with Salesforce and maybe some integration with some of our homegrown applications, but nothing that is overly involved. It has worked out, but it was hard work.

We are not right now using this solution for automation projects.

Lessons learned and advice for others:

• Don't bite off more than you can chew. 
• Do things in smaller pieces. 
• Do your homework upfront with prep tests. 
• Take it slow (implement slowly). 
• Get your requirements upfront. 
• Understand the process your users are looking for. 
  

We use FileNet to store all our content. We have a quarter of a billion documents stored and it works great for us.

It has taken the manual work out of our billing process, and automated it.

We actually use it in conjunction with BPM to auto-bill our customers, based on when the bill gets checked into FileNet.

I would love it if single sign-on was a lot easier to set up. That's the most difficult part of it.

We have it load-balanced, so we don't really have outages. With HA it's very stable.

It could be easier to scale, but in our implementation we can build up a new server and a whole new environment in about a day and a half.

It would be nice if they could make it like containers are working in Kubernetes to auto-scale based on demand.

I've used it quite often. Technical support could be better, more responsive in a timely manner. I've learned to actually open up tickets earlier in the morning because you seem to get better help than if you wait until the afternoon.

We didn't have a previous solution. We went with FileNet as our content repository from the beginning.

When selecting a vendor we like to have somebody that can provide good support and a good business relationship; we like to build relationships with our vendors.

It's very complex. We have a lot of pieces that tie together with our FileNet, like  domains. So it's complex.

I would give it an eight out of 10. What it needs to be a 10 is easier to configure single sign-on.

I would recommend that when you are doing the initial setup that you use fewer metadata fields. The fewer you use the better off you're going to be in the long run, for performance.

We have some projects now with a university in Bogota, here in Colombia. We developed a correspondence process and some administration processes with invoices. We also have a government project where the main process is around the lifecycle of documents. We use FileNet to automate correspondence processes when our clients receive documents.

There a lot of legal requirements in Colombia and companies need to automate their processes around these requirements. We incorporate FileNet in the middle of the process and we collaborate to make our clients' processes more efficient.

We offer FileNet to our clients with IBM's RPA capabilities and help to automate processes.

The most valuable feature is when we combine FileNet with Datacap. We have a lot of client data here. We use IBM Datacap's capabilities to capture data and then we use FileNet's capabilities for filing, to create an archive of documents. 

We also use the check-in and check-out capabilities a lot to enable correct document security for users. 

In addition, we use a lot of workflow for document processing for our clients.

Finally, we use FileNet's ability to expose information via APIs and interoperate with other systems.

IBM has a lot of documentation but the kind of information in a lot of the documents can be confusing to our clients. It would be easier if they used video tutorials. Right now, the information is too hard to understand, and there is a lot of it. If they used videos I think FinalNet would be easy to use for an end-user.

The technical information is hard to understand at times, especially on the installation of the product. And that's particularly true when you have to install FileNet with high-availability.

In addition, there are a lot of use cases for FileNet as a platform. There are other tools on the market with demos or models, ready-to-use use cases that can be configured. With FileNet, all projects we have to be developed step-by-step. IBM should develop some use cases or pre-configured models, across use cases. That would help us speed up implementation a lot.

FileNet is stable because the web application server is a very powerful tool. The problem is that people don't always correctly configure this tool. If the people doing the configuration are not the right people, the client has problems. But the web application server is very stable when configured correctly.

Scalability is good. IBM is one of the platforms that we can upgrade. They have different versions and new versions and upgrades happen without a lot of issues. As a developer or partner, we can take advantage of the flexibility of the scalability.

There are three levels of support. The first one is local support which relies on our experience as a partner. At the second level, we use IBM support for our clients. Sometimes, an issue we have is when our client has an older version for a given component. IBM has told us that some of these versions are no longer supported and an upgrade is required. After that, they can give support. But if we are on the correct version or release, the support is good.

In terms of ROI on the automation processes, FileNet is so expensive in Colombia. So return on investment takes time.

A lot of companies here need solutions like FinalNet. Its capabilities are very good. However, when it comes to pricing, IBM needs to make an effort to improve the cost. That's the main issue regarding use of FinalNet in Columbia.

In our company, we have three different tools for documents services. One of them is FileNet, another is Laserfiche, and there is a third one. But our company has an agreement with IBM where there is flexibility on pricing.

One of the main differences between IBM and its competitors is the pricing. In this market, IBM is the most expensive platform. But IBM has a lot of components in one package. We can use this advantage to offer just one package with all these components. With the competitors, we may need to combine technologies. Sometimes customers feel that having a lot of different vendors for one solution makes things hard to maintain. With IBM, we have just one platform with multiple components, making it a very good solution in terms of maintenance.

Support is also important after the initial implementation. That's one of the differences between IBM and its competitors

You need to be patient when you first use FileNet because the information is hard to understand. People often learn a lot when they go over the licensing agreement because it gives them all the possibilities of the platform. You also need technical expertise to use the platform. In addition, it's important to use support after implementation. Keep updated on the versions of the product and try to use all its capabilities. Don't try to customize the product code because that may lead you into difficulties.

I would rate FileNet, overall, at seven out of ten. It's not just about the platform. It's also the skills of the people around the platform. That is the most important thing you have. The platform is good but it's the people who know the platform who can be hard to find.

It is usually the client's system of record for their documents. In addition, it can be used for digital assets, like video and recordings.

It provides a centralized system of truth around their documents. It also allows them to automate their processes and gain efficiencies in cost reductions. 

It puts governance in place around the content and processes:

• People can only see what they should be able to see.
• It is auditable, so you have an audit trail.
• Access levels can be set to certain parts of the document based on role level.

Our most valuable feature is it's highly scalable. There can be up to billions of documents or content items. It can support thousands to tens of thousands of concurrent users. There is also tight integration between the content and process functionality.

I would like IBM to improve with each release, continue moving towards a continual, tighter integration, and build solutions that take advantage of all the different modules the platform has from one place.

It is stable.

It is used by large enterprises. It has to be scalable and robust for them to use. We have seen that on multiple projects over the years.

We work very closely with IBM and their technical service as part of a solution proposal. We also work with them to support and implement our client systems. It's a team effort.

We have been using the platform over the years. They have continued to make the product easier to install. With the new release of container support, it's becoming even easier to install. The trick to it is the design architecture which allows you to scale, and also putting in performance tuning for the scaling to happen.

Some of our customers are IBM shops and work with IBM exclusively, but there are also customers who look at other solutions.

Overall, IBM has a great end-to-end solution. I would highly recommend it.

Most important criteria for our customers when selecting a vendor: stable and scalable. Performance is a very big deal for most of our customers, and knowing it's a secure platform as well.