We do have TIBCO, which we were using back in the day when we purchased the SEEBURGER solution, but it is limited to being used for internal communication, not to communicate with external partners. One of the reasons is that it was costly. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is way cheaper in terms of maintenance and support when compared to TIBCO.

SEEBURGER BIS pretty much does whatever we need for our integration, and we are happy. We don't know a better system to evaluate. 

To survive in this world, I think SEEBURGER BIS is one of the tools that you will need to have. Comparable to other tools, we found it's much better.

Our ERP system has also an integration module, but compared to SEEBURGER BIS, it's much smaller. So, if anything new comes, we deploy SEEBURGER BIS instead of the ERP solution.

Around one and a half years ago, we evaluated other solutions around the time we introduced the API management within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). We recognized that SEEBURGER is the only one which provides such a wide spectrum of functionality, all from one vendor, without adding modules from a third party. All the others we've had an eye on say, "Yeah, we can add this or you can download that plug-in from this company." This is not the case with SEEBURGER. You can have all these components from one vendor, which helps avoid running into trouble because of a vendor saying, "I'm not responsible." That is the biggest strength of SEEBURGER, beside their strong interest in OSRAM. 

They've really spent a lot of time giving us all the answers to all the topics we've been interested in. Once we introduced the API management, even the SEEBURGER CTO spent time aligning with us on what the API management roadmap looks like at SEEBURGER, to ensure that my management could support the decision, together with me, to use SEEBURGER for API management. We introduced it and we are happy with it. We see that what SEEBURGER promised us is now available in the current versions.

When they decided not to move forward with anything to replace IBM Connect Enterprise, I looked for solutions that would benefit our eyewear side of the business. We wanted to go with the version of SEEBURGER BIS that runs on SAP PO, but we were overruled. The organization purchased SEEBURGER BIS and wanted us to use that version too.

We did evaluate other options in 2015, although I can't recall the names of the products.

We looked at a company called NetEDI as well as TrueCommerce. There were two more but they were discounted right at the beginning because they didn't have time for us. NetEDI EDI was ruled out quite early on so it came down to two companies.

TrueCommerce seemed really promising but I was reading a lot of negative stuff in the press and online about them; that they promised that they will deliver but they don't deliver. The sales guy was really good, but if the tech people behind it can't do what they say they're going to do... I looked at the review sites, like IT Central Station, to find out. That can sway the impact of your decision-making.

As far as I can remember, the company looked at IBM Sterling and at outsourcing.

We didn't evaluate other solutions at that time. SEEBURGER came recommended and we went with them. SAP put us in touch with them.

There was a big list, including the IBM solution. There were six other platforms but it was three-and-a-half years ago.

Both our US and Canadian operations evaluated the same companies then, and SEEBURGER was chosen in Canada. When we did the evaluation again, here in the US, we ended up with pretty much the same results. The fact that Canada was using it helped make the decision to go with it.

I have been in this field for 25 years. I have worked with a lot of the larger integration vendors over the years. Integration vendor software tends to be fairly similar in functionality. You can pretty readily move from one product to another product and not lose too many steps, as far as understanding and utilization, i.e., user experience. However, there are some things that set SEEBURGER BIS apart from the others. I don't want to go to another vendor software after using SEEBURGER BIS, because it has these "things" that make it that much better and easier to work with. It just makes my life as a developer so much easier.

A lot of the integration vendors have a software development kit that usually looks like an Eclipse plugin for Eclipse IDE. This allows you to code extensions to the base functionality of the software suite. If the software does X, Y, and Z, but you want to add A, B and C to the end of it, then you can build your own extension to the base code and plug it in. Most of the vendors have that these days. Comparing SEEBURGER to some of the other providers, SEEBURGER BIS requires the least amount of professional services know-how. For example, that PSO level of knowledge which is sometimes needed, where you get into your own development effort to write an extension, and halfway and you are like, "What the heck?" Then, you need to have the expense to get professional services involved to help you out. However, with SEEBURGER BIS, I have been able to code many of my own extensions using their software development kit on my own with very little insight from their professional services. It is very usable and user-friendly compared to some of the other solutions.

On some vendor products in order to find logging, especially if they have bolted together multiple vendor's products, you have to go explore here, there, and everywhere. With SEEBURGER BIS, it is all together. It is not hard to find the logging. It is all pretty readable too. You don't have to go through a lot of jargon to find what you are looking for. Probably the best thing about the logging is that you can't necessarily get logging down to the packet capture level in other vendors' products. So, if you're doing an SFTP or an HTTP connection and you want to capture the packets, I have needed to install things like Wireshark or Fiddler with other vendors' software to catch the packets going across the wire to see what is going on. In SEEBURGER BIS, you can turn on the packet capturing ability and just go look at it within the product itself. You don't have to waste time installing Wireshark and getting it all connected to your network because you can get that level of logging right out of the application. 

I have been through migrations a lot over the years. This one was interesting to read about because they were crazy about it. The last vendor had some problems, so they went and actually started with a list of 50 integration vendors. You go, "Holy cow, are there really that many integration vendors even out there?" There are, but they range in size. So they started with this gigantic list that they probably pulled from some vendor, like Gartner. Then, they boil down 50 to 30 then to 15. Ultimately, after looking at all the use cases and what they wanted to get out of them, they boiled 15 down to three, then they had the last three come in-house and give their dog and pony shows along with their overviews of their software. Just based on the use cases and flexibility, SEEBURGER was chosen over all those different vendors. There is some pretty good amount of documentation that was written up on that process. It was pretty thorough.

Among the bigger vendors out there in the marketplace, IBM Sterling, Globalscape, Axway, and Cleo were some of the big vendors in the mix. 

Deciding to go with SEEBURGER BIS was a mixture of the GUI and simplicity for the team to understand. A lot of the team here, other than just a couple of us, are operational-level folks. They don't necessarily have broad computer science foundational skills. Therefore, the GUI interface had to be easy enough to use but these types of folks could work in it without too much trouble. The big things were: 

1. Ease of use in understanding the screens and how to tie together a workflow without too much developer-level knowledge. 
2. The capability to handle use cases. All these different 12 or 13 vendors were doing different data flow patterns, so SEEBURGER BIS had to be able to support all of them.
3. Stability, because the previous vendor had problems with it. That had been a pain point which they were trying to solve at the time. 

So, it was really a mixture of those three things.

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

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

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

We had IBM come in and do presentations. We had Sterling Commerce come in and do presentations. And we had a conversation with SEEBURGER. 

IBM came in here, they sent 15 guys and tried to sell us a solution that was doing 50 things that I did not want, did not need, did not care about. They didn't understand that, no matter how hard I tried to explain it to them. All they wanted to do was to tell you about how wonderful they were and how powerful this tool was that they wanted me to pay a million dollars for. 

Then, the second vendor, which was Sterling Commerce, toned it down some, but it was still a very potent tool. And the price was very high. 

I had specific requirements that I had to meet for EDI. When SEEBURGER showed up on the scene, they said, "Okay, we'll give you EDI, and check out this price." It was everything that we needed to get done, and even today it's still what we need. They didn't overkill it. They didn't try to sell me a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't need. They sold me the right functionality at the right time at the right price.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was not involved in evaluating other options.

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.

They went through the selection process to see what interfacing applications were available in the market.

We went with the preferred, recommended EVI translator that Infor recommended.

No comment. We chose what we thought was the best.

Solutions from AMTrix and Microsoft were also taken into consideration.

We evaluated:

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

We evaluated TIBCO and Axway System Integrator (SI).