We have no issues with scalability at the moment. The old version was really creaking at the seams when we eventually migrated everything, or most things, off it of it. That was a bit touch and go for a couple of months. The new one has not got any issues at all.

The usage is increasing all the time. It is the integration tool within this company. It's a central part of all the internal processes that we have. It's the glue that holds the company together as such, in a lot of cases. It is being invested in quite heavily.

We have less than ten users on the solution right now. We have one admin and an engineer and then a few other users. The scalability is good. There are so many features you can access. I'd rate it eight out of ten.

The fact that it is on-premises does not affect its scalability. For us, it works quite well and meets our needs. We have 20 to 25 users on the product right now. Mostly, they are consultants. It's used on a daily basis. 

The solution will scale out automatically, but there are some issues with scaling in. Around 100 users are using SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite in our organization.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

Scalability is a little challenging because of the way we have set up the solution. Back in the day, it did not support Active-Active, which would give you the flexibility of managing your transactions across process engines. If you receive a file and it's executing within a process engine, it's very isolated to that process engine. If the process engine is loaded up with thousands or maybe millions of records, it will wait until it all gets flushed out and then start processing the next batch. But with Active-Active, there is the flexibility where it can share the workload across different process engines, and this now comes natively within SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). 

Initially, we did not have that, but have with recent in-house development we have that functionality. We adjusted our architecture in a way that we leveraged load balancing and internal configuration for Active-Active, but it's not SEEBURGER Active-Active. Now, it can actually balance the load across different parallel instances. But having said that, every instance is still a singleton instance. It cannot share the load with any other process engine.

But moving to version 6.7, I think scaling will be a lot easier and it will be on-the-fly. But scalability, for us, has been kind of challenging because we did not move to Active-Active.

Our business is contacting resellers and other partners and we do onboard a lot of partners on a weekly basis. The business is something that is growing.

As for the number of users, it is different for the different components. There are 200 business users who go into Message Tracking and check the status of their transactions, download or review a file, or review a process and whether it ended properly or not. We also have 40 developers working on different parts of development in SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). There are another 10 users from our support team.

Comparing it to other systems that we have seen and had interactions with, this is most scalable system in terms of integration. It has many functions which are not possible to do from other systems. We are happy with the scalability.

We are using this system globally at about 40 to 50 locations. We are collecting the coverage data of hundreds of trading partners. It's incredible. If we had been doing this manually, I am not sure we could have survived.

When it comes to people who use SEEBURGER BIS from a development perspective, we have a few, but not many.

I would say the scalability is unlimited because you can add additional nodes in an unlimited way. You have several topics where you can make use of the scalability of the solution. You might have multiple nodes where you are distributing the same activity to multiple computers or VM guest systems. That way, you increase the power of the whole system.

You can even split instances. For example, I want to split user activities done over the front end or user portal, like using an API catalog, from the processing activities, such as translating a file or communicating a file to SAP or to an external partner. That enables me to increase the power for the processing when I do not need additional power for the users. There are multiple modules, the process engine, Adapter Engine, and DataStore, and you can distribute them to several machines and increase them in an unlimited way. What we've heard a few years ago is, that SEEBURGER has tested with 250 instances, meaning there were 250 computers working as one or system, and that might not be the latest test.

We have 300 to 350 people working with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), but from different areas. We have end-users using it for business monitoring checking the messages exchanged with their partners. It could be a sales person who wants to see which messages have been sent by his customer. We also have developers on the platform developing APIs, as well as the people developing mappings for the B2B activities. There are also administrators, who are mainly part of the department I'm working in. We enable people to make use of integration capabilities. The user interface has been improved drastically over the last few years, and that means they do not always have to ask us, "Can you do this for me?" or "Can you search that for me?" We give them an account and then they can go in and gather the information on their own.

In terms of future-proofing our business, we see that SEEBURGER is fast enough that even our architects receive a satisfying answer. Whenever we ask about, for example, "Can you deal with Docker containers?" or "Can you do API management?" or "Can you do data ingestion for data lake? they have a solution ready. We know that SEEBURGER has invested a lot of effort into research and development. It is not only that they follow what the customers are doing and requesting, but they even prepare for the future. That's interesting for us, because for some topics I was not even aware that SEEBURGER is dealing with that, like Docker or Kubernetes.

If SEEBURGER sees something that is required, things which are not necessarily related to integration, like running a system on a Docker container, or Active-Active, SEEBURGER provides such options to make the customer happy and to ensure that their product is running properly. They make sure they can handle future demands. They do everything to ensure that they are ready for the future.

Even in regard to security, for example, we see that they avoid having security issues or running into issues with outdated software because, with the service packs, they always prepare for future software for new Java versions, or to be ready for new operating systems or new database versions. They always have a roadmap to ensure that there's nothing we can complain about.

On the technical side, there are five or six users.

We have plans to increase usage of SEEBURGER BIS in the future. The retail side of the business is open to utilizing the solution more. Also, as the insurance business grows, they will definitely be using it.

Scalability-wise, I don't know of any limits for us, so there doesn't seem to be a problem.

At this point, we only have two users, although we need to enlarge that role. I am responsible for the customer setup, connection setup, and map design. My other colleague also does customer setup and communication setup, but no map design.

We plan on expanding our usage because we're going to start moving our Asian colleagues. As soon as we find a customer that's able to do EDI with them, we will turn it on. We're certainly increasing in that world.

We now approach every customer and look for EDI opportunities. Now that we've determined that we can handle receiving CAD-type drawings through it, we are going to send that to different plants. We certainly plan on using it more, and I know due to COVID, we've never experienced the number of customers asking us for EDIs as we are now.

Scalability was the whole reason we went with SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). Our hope is to add 20 to 40 trading partners a year. Because we've done the groundwork, we've done our initial messages, we don't need to do anything more from an integration point of view. Now it's SEEBURGER's job to connect their platform to our trading partners' platforms. That was the whole selling point.

Our entire organization is the intended beneficiary of our SEEBURGER deployment. At the moment, we've only actually got it linked into our Germany and U.K. offices, but we're expanding use in the coming months into our Italy office, for suppliers, customers, and e-invoicing.

The scalability is really good. That's one of the biggest features. Depending on the size of your company, how much data you have or frequency, their solution can manage it. You can grow vertically or you can grow horizontally. It really depends on the business. They have the capabilities to grow and expand and handle all that architecture.

In North America, our company has smaller needs for scalability compared to what we've seen other companies do, although it is bigger than our European side. We do have certain things that Europe doesn't have, different components or boxes in front of the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) server, such as proxy servers. Security is different in North America. We have a second node that handles more of the high-volume transactions, but we really haven't fully utilized it yet. We're just getting it up and running now.

We have two production SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) applications, one for Europe and one for North America. Behind them, there are quality environments. Behind them we have another instance for their compliance checker, which is another tool. We also have a development box and a sandbox for initial patches and upgrades.

We did add in some extra processes and our volume increase doesn't seem to have caused a problem.

We don't have plans to use any of their additional services, like API management or MST invoicing or IoT at the moment because we've now invested in Microsoft Azure, where logic apps give us an integration tool.

We have no problems with its scalability. We did a performance test where we did about eight times our volume through it in a single hour, for an entire heavy week, and it handled it. We've had no issues with it. Everything we've added to it - multiple documents inside the implementation, different components to it - we've had no issues. It's handled it all.

It is mostly our team who has access to the front-ends to develop configure processings. We don't make it too widely available across the company. We have a few pockets of people who can log into the portal to view their data on their own kind of self-service. Other than that, we mostly do behind the scenes data integration, moving data between applications and external partners. That is all done by our team. It is not done widely throughout the company, it is just one small data integration team. We serve every application in the company and are connected with a couple of 1,000 external partners as well. The touch points are many, but the people who have access to the GUI to actually do the work are few.

The scalability is pretty good. We haven't had to do a ton of scaling exercises over the years. Our volumes have stayed fairly static and grown at a certain rate every year. We just reassess them with our professional services person once a year and make sure that we are watching our metrics, memory, and storage really closely. We have that in our daily monitoring. As we see it going up, we just go, "Okay, we need to add some more RAM memory or more Java heap space." 

I would say the process of scaling is pretty easy as long as you stay on top of it and monitor your throughput really closely to know the numbers, knowing when something is growing. If you put in a new integration that brings in a whole lot more traffic, obviously you have to reassess and make sure that you are scaled to handle it. I have got a project like that coming up soon which will take us from thousands of files a day up to millions of transactions a day. This is something where we are looking closely at scalability and figuring out what is needed to be able to support that new volume, and not have an impact on the existing.

The fact that the solution is available in the cloud, on-premises, and as a hybrid deployment makes it flexible and scalable for us. Every company has cloud initiatives going on right now. To know that there are options out there gives our company more things to think through and price out. We have done a lot of pricing exercises around those three different options, so we have a pretty good sense now of the cost differential between on-premise versus cloud versus vendor iPaaS cloud. We know where things are going to fall cost-wise, so now it is just a matter of, where do you want to put your money? For example, do you want to have more staff to maintain the system yourself with all your infrastructure people, or do you want to outsource that, pay that money and some more to the vendor to maintain it for you? So, it kind of just depends on where your priorities are as an organization. I think it is a good thing that there are multiple options. It has given us a chance to slice and dice the numbers.

We've had to increase the core processing units in our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) central instance, maybe twice, and the same with memory and disk storage. We've been able to wait until the need has come and not use up all that extra processing and memory that we didn't need.

There was documentation on how to do it and when to do it but we still used consulting services to have them direct us. We said, "Here's what we're going to do. Is this correct?" and they were able to lead us through anything we needed to do to scale up and pick up more transactions or more disk space.

So, scalability is pretty good. Right now we're only running a central instance of SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS). They allow you to split it up into individual instances. If we wanted to separate the US from Europe we could do that, and allocate different resources to each. That's another area where they're scalable. It's been pretty good for us so far.

We've been able to flex it where we needed to, to accommodate other silo systems, outside of our core component applications. It's about to be tested again when we get into this new P2P solution we're looking at. I've still got SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) on the table as part of that solution, so I would say that it's very scalable.

The scalability is good.

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.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite is scalable. 

The scalability is pretty solid.

I plan to keep working with SEEBURGER as long as I can. When we have an integration, they are there to answer questions and work with us. I don't see any problems if we ever need to increase.

There are approximately 15 business users who connect to the SEEBURGER BIS portal to view transactions. 

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.

It is highly scalable.

We haven't encountered any scalability issues. Whenever we've added more components in or increased the volume of transactions, we have not had any issues.

There are about 30 organizations to whom we are connected via the SEEBURGER infrastructure.

We use it everyday, which will probably only increase. We don't have any concrete plans because this is dependent on our third-party customers, as well, and whether they have the infrastructures to support this type of development work. If they don't, then we won't. If they do, then we would. It also depends on return on investment. Some customers are more important than others.

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.

On-premise isn't that scalable. For the design of it, I know 6.7 fixes that, but the cloud versions are very scalable. We prefer on-premise though.

We have four technicians. I am the manager, I have a coordinator, an analyst, and a part-time analyst.

We generally take turns on who's going to deploy it over the weekend between the four of us. Of course, we work to network our resources, to take snapshots of different things, just in case we need to roll back.

SEEBURGER is our connection with SAP to the rest of our system. So it is one of our critical systems, it's number two after SAP. We absolutely have plans to increase usage. With the upgrade in API, we would lean a lot heavier into our implementation with our customers outside of EDI, once we have that in place and working.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. The architecture of their software and solutions is very scalable on paper. If your network cannot handle their requirements, they will offer other ideas that will work. Thumbs up on that part.

Scalability-wise, I think there is still some scope but, overall, it's pretty scalable.

The scalability depends on the price - which suite you're getting. At the moment, the version we are on, which is 6.52, is quite scalable because it has one adapter engine. 

Their architecture includes an admin server and an adapter server so you can just add more servers by adding licenses to it. If we want to scale up, we just a few more adapter engines into it; it's just adding a virtual server and more functions to it. It's not a big issue. Its scalability is very good at the moment. The software installation is not a big issue. So once you install it, you can just attach it to the existing architecture.

We have a lot of end-users sending files: FTP, SFTP, web services, or HTTP; and there are other services like AS2. We have about 75 to 80 customers and they interact with us with a file or data transfer.

It is our preferred tool at the moment. It's part of our strategy. I don't know about the future, but currently it is the only tool that we are using for interfacing with our various systems. We are still hoping to host most of the system. Most systems are migrating to the cloud, so we don't know yet. There it would an application-to-application connection, so maybe the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) role might be reduced, but currently it's used a lot.

In terms of scalability, that's why we're going to the cloud, so we have global scale. In and of itself, I could do many more hundreds of customers through the on-prem solution, but that's not where my company's growth is. We want to use this same solution in Asia and not have something different feeding the factories there, so that's why we are moving to the cloud offering.

We had no scalability issues.

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.

At the moment, I would say that we’re not utilizing the platform’s full potential, so a question about scalability is not relevant.

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.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is highly scalable. Since moving to Active-Active we have not had to change our environment.

This product is highly scalable.