What is our primary use case?
We are mostly using it for ETL-related workloads. In our organization we have a lot of different systems that need to talk to each other. Files have to be transferred from one system to another. We use GoAnywhere to automate the file transfer processes, whether it involves an SFTP system or a Windows network shared drive.
We also use it for data translation and data load, when we want to extract the data from a database system and create a CSV file and send it to a downstream system.
And we have recently started using Cloud Connectors for things like Microsoft Azure Data Lake and blob storage. Most organizations are moving to the cloud and we have a lot of cloud-related integrations now coming into the picture. GoAnywhere MFT helps to accomplish them.
How has it helped my organization?
With the automation you don't have to worry about doing anything manually. You create a workflow and schedule it. You have various options to schedule your workflow daily, or at a certain date and time, and a repeat frequency. If you have complex scheduling requirements, those can also be done.
The very quick development time is another benefit.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the ability to call a workflow from another workflow. That really gives you an edge by increasing reusability and speeding up development time. You can create a workflow which is a type of template and then call that workflow from any other workflow. That's really helpful for us. It has sped up development time by 80 to 90 percent. All you have to do is pass the parameters from the caller and everything is done by your template.
And after using it for some time and you become very comfortable with the syntax, if you want to quickly develop something you can directly edit the XML. It creates XML for all the workflows and you can directly import and edit them. That also helps with the speed of the development.
The solution is very intuitive because all the help is built-in. When you go to Help there is a developer guide there. You can search any library or function. Also, the tooltips are helpful. You can click on any label and it shows a tooltip that describes what it does. It also provides integrated development, meaning all the development can be done in the GoAnywhere portal itself, from a browser. You don't need any additional tools or an IDE. It's very user-friendly and developer-friendly.
GoAnywhere also has a very good log through which you can track any issues.
In addition, the workflow features are able to fulfill the requirements most of the time. Only certain, very rare scenarios are not covered. But GoAnywhere also provides a custom task feature. Apart from all the built-in tasks, if your workflow demands a special task, and you have the expertise, you can create a custom task. That's a good advantage.
What needs improvement?
They need to increase the number of Cloud Connectors and speed up their development of them.
Also, there are a number of built-in tasks in GoAnywhere. One, in particular, the write to CSV task, is slow. If you have, say, 100,000 records in your row set and you want to write them to a CSV file, it takes a long time. That definitely requires performance improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for more than eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable. In all the time I've been using it, I haven't seen any deficiencies in terms of workflows or behaviors.
Any memory issues happen because of poor workflow design. Otherwise, It's very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have gone from 40 or 50 workflows to more than 600 workflows now. But we have only slightly increased the memory footprint of the server on which GoAnywhere is installed. We haven't seen any issues. The solution is scalable.
We have around 70 to 80 users of GoAnywhere and, at any point in time, some 10 to 20 active users. Among our 600-plus workflows, there are some running every hour or every minute or daily. On average, they transfer 100,000 files per day.
We have four environments: dev, test, QA, and production. Dev/sandbox is a single environment, while Test, QA, and Production are clustered. We have two nodes for high-availability.
Within our company there is still a lot of demand for GoAnywhere. We are going to increase our use of it by 10 to 20 percent per year.
How are customer service and support?
Their technical support is good. Responses are not really instantaneous, but they respond within their SLA. They could improve their response time.
How would you rate customer service and support?
What was our ROI?
It's a great value in terms of our overall satisfaction. It helps automate all our processes and reduces development time, so we don't have to invest much in developing. We haven't really seen any issues using it in all this time, or challenges in terms of operations. Overall, it brings us great value.
Because every new development request requires a certain amount of effort, new development in GoAnywhere is really fast thanks to the template workflow and being able to call another workflow. It helps reduce development costs and that's a great value.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is very organization-friendly. It's a one-time license, not a monthly or recurring model. Compared to other tools it's less expensive.
What other advice do I have?
If your overall requirements are related to ETL and sending files to different systems, and you want to automate these kinds of daily processes, then GoAnywhere would be the best fit. It's one of the best solutions. It's lightweight and doesn't need heavy servers or big hardware to run, and it's very scalable. All these features really add to the GoAnywhere solution.
Overall, the solution is a nine out of 10. The ease of use is definitely 9.5 and the performance is a nine. But in terms of catching up with all the new standards, it's a little behind it. On that, I would give it an eight. It doesn't have connectors to various new systems. For development, it's a 9.5.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.