GoAnywhere MFT Reviews

The use cases would be to transfer files and send files of large sizes.

We have not yet collaborated with third parties. We might see benefits in the future when we have SharePoint.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is easy to use, easy to set up, and the support is good.

I am not able to go in and say 'forgot password.' I need to access the admin portal to change the password from there. I would like to be able to do MFA and reset the password via email.

I have used GoAnywhere for less than a year. April will mark one year.

We hardly have any issues with lagging, crashing, or downtime.

The solution is scalable. We utilize it minimally, and it seems easy to scale up.

Their customer service is good, with decent support. They get back to us within a day with answers. Their documentation is also very helpful.

Positive

We used standard MFT, FileZilla, and just FTP protocol within Windows Server. We switched as we were concerned about security and wanted ease of use and setup.

The initial deployment was easy. It took us just a couple of days to fully set up.

We used Fortra's implementation team since it came with the package. We had to purchase eight hours of implementation time. From our end, mainly one person was involved in the deployment.

The pricing is too expensive for what we need. If we could cut it by 50%, that would be great.

We looked at other solutions, however, it was time-consuming, and since Fortra's offers very good products, we did not pursue other options further.

I recommend the solution for secure transfer and easy setup. Despite the pricing, it is a reliable product.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'm using it for automated exports of reports, where we're running scripts and exporting data in various formats, as well as for sending notifications to clients, for FTP uploads and downloads. We have patient enrollment files that get posted to our FTP and I'm using monitors to determine when a file gets downloaded and processed, and then results posted back.

I use GoAnywhereMFT to kick off other applications which will then do most of my file conversions and transformations. I'm reading data back in, either from queries or file sets that get created, in order to handle other functions of the jobs.

We do use the API functions a little bit, although I'm doing most of that through other applications, kicked off by MFT.

It helps centralize the exchange of data. Controlling the syncing of databases is pretty critical for us. We need the data to be up to date. If GoAnywhere wasn't able to do it, we would either have to develop an internal solution or look for an alternative.

The solution's workflow features have definitely helped eliminate manual processes. We're still a small company, we just started up in 2020. But we're already running hundreds of jobs a day and, and without the workflow features, we would have to hire many people to be able to do those same tasks.

In addition, we are a PBM (pharmacy benefits manager) and one of the core functions that has to be done with every client is receiving patient enrollment data. We also do inbound and outbound patient accumulation files, invoicing, reports, and status jobs. Just in those few transactions with all of our clients, that's a lot of potential manual touch points that have to be done. GoAnywhere has allowed me to automate all of that, plus additional tasks that would normally go to a reporting team.

As a company, it's allowing us to hire people who can come up with innovative ideas instead of hiring people just to do repetitive work. It's allowing us to grow and focus on new things instead of just trying to keep up and tread water on current tasks.

Another benefit is that it has PGP functionality built right in, and that gives me a good way to actually manage the keys, have a list of them, and use them. This is my one repository for all of that data and it gets picked up by the jobs. Previously, I had to have a separate PGP key management tool. Anytime that we would receive a file that was encrypted, while I might have been able to automate the transfer down of the FTP, but I would have to manually decrypt the file. Having that one core functionality can save me up to an hour a day.  Now, I can come in in the morning, log in to my inbox and get a report of everything that's happening: what has errored and what hasn't, instead of spending the day actually doing those processes.

We automate about 95 percent of all our transfers, so GoAnywhere is quite a help. We'll still have unscheduled file dumps or transfers that need to happen, of course, but I immediately use GoAnywhere to set up a job for anything that occurs on any type of regular basis.

I like the organization of resources, specifically listing out all of our FTPs and having a name and description to easily organize them. I also like the scheduler. The organization and the scheduling, being able to create the folders and the jobs, have been really helpful.

Looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere’s workflow features, I use it with other applications and, so far, there hasn't been anything I haven't been able to accomplish either through GoAnywhere exclusively, or using GoAnywhere with another application to get a task done. Everything revolves around GoAnywhere. It has a really good suite of features. It would be unlikely for us to move away from GoAnywhere because it has very good core functionality that we like to augment with a couple of additional applications.

Pretty much everything we've needed to connect to has been done fairly seamlessly.

The only issue I've had with connectivity, database or otherwise, revolved around an SSH key. I tried to create a key, but it was incompatible with a vendor's SFTP. And when that vendor has tried to create a key and share it with me, I have not been unable to import it into GoAnywhere. I had to use a third-party app to create the key and find something that was mutually compatible. I've submitted tickets on that to GAMFT for consideration.

They could possibly improve the error handling on jobs. Whenever it generates error logs, sometimes the error is very generic. It takes a little work to diagnose what's really going on. It may just say "IO Exception" and that doesn't really tell you much.

We do have to occasionally restart GoAnywhere because a job gets stuck or we are having connectivity issues. It restarts very quickly on the server. We might have five minutes of downtime at the most every one to two months. It has been pretty reliable.

From what I've seen, it would be able to scale for everything I foresee us needing in the next five to 10 years. From my understanding, we can actually turn some of that up and add servers if necessary. I don't really expect any problems there.

I now look at any new process that needs to be considered through the lens of how I would automate it through GoAnywhere. That being said, given our size, I would call our usage moderate. We have about 300 jobs a day and at our peak I would expect about 500 jobs a day. Obviously, that would increase as we grow.

As an organization, we're still adding jobs. We don't have a shortage of things that we want to automate with GoAnywhere.

Technical support has been pretty good. We've had some support directly through their chat service. I've had a couple of more urgent questions that needed to be answered and they were able to resolve them. We've also interacted with them via email and they've been very responsive and helpful.

They also have a queue-type ticket system that we've used a little bit.

Positive

They got it set up pretty quickly. A HelpSystems person was available to work through the minor issues and answer questions as necessary.

A lot of the help came from doing the demo as far as seeing what we could do. The implementation itself was pretty smooth.

In terms of the intuitiveness, there's definitely a learning curve. You have to learn how a job should really be set up and that took a little more time than I wanted, but it was good to get the knowledge by going through that process. I started out with very simplistic jobs and then started adding checks and error handling as we went.

One example of the learning curve is, to zip up files, I have to first move them to a workspace and work from there instead of a network share. Nothing in the application tells you this, but I figured it out after some job failures. Encountering things like that takes a little bit of effort.

As you get the feel of how GoAnywhere expects to do things and you make the corrections to set your jobs up to match that structure, it works fine.

We haven't done a whole lot in terms of updates yet. We are trying to review how to best update without impacting our production jobs unexpectedly. We have someone who will be talking with GoAnywhere to facilitate that upgrade process.

This is hard to calculate exactly, but when I can spend time with my wife instead of staying late at work, I would say it is worth it.

Though cost was a consideration, it was not under my umbrella.  Ultimately, we found the tool worth the cost.

We evaluated another product called MoveIt but GoAnywhere seemed to be a better product in my opinion.

There are certain functions that GAMFT can support but I like to use other applications for. For example, file transformation is possible within GoAnywhere, but easier in another application we use.

I try to evaluate what GoAnywhere is better at doing than other applications and use them accordingly. It handles file movement very well and I like the workspace feature.

As part of the implementation process it would be a good idea to have a couple of examples, actual scenarios, you want to do. GoAnywhere has templates and they're good, but they're a little simplified compared to what you can do with the solution. That's really a compliment to the software itself. The templates are all about moving files, and GoAnywhere is capable of more than that. Having examples that involve reading data in from a database and identifying certain data lines to set variables is a good idea.

I would suggest, where applicable, to spend the time to design into the job a procedure where, if a process fails, you can retry, or reset things like filenames and locations.

GoAnywhere MFT tool is used to transfer files from one end user to another. 

Traditionally, you would transfer a file as an attachment to an email. However, that does not always work very well, especially if you want to continuously transfer files. For example, sometimes you need to transfer files every hour. In such cases, traditional ways of file transfers do not work very well. This is where GoAnywhere MFT is helpful. You can just place a file at a location and it automatically gathers the file and transfers it to the destination or wherever you want to transfer it. 

It provides the easiest and safest way to transfer files. There is security and multiple advantages to using an MFT tool like GoAnywhere MFT.

It enables you to easily transfer files and not bother about sending them manually through emails. You can automate it. You do not want to log in and attach files in an email. You can just place them at a specified location, and they are picked up by the GoAnywhere MFT server. If you want to transfer a file to an external vendor, you can either use the vendor's location or your own location to put the file. If the external vendor provides you with a location, you can use that. Otherwise, you can create a folder and provide access to the external vendor. There are two options. It is very easy and secure.

Scheduling is valuable. You can schedule a transfer for any time you want. It can be hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly. You can transfer the file on AWS, Azure, or SharePoint. These are the main advantages.

It is easy to use. You just need to create a template and then the sequence is already provided to you. You just have to input the details that you got from the requester. You do not need to put any code, but if you have to do PGP key and encryption, it is a little bit complicated because all users are not aware of all the cases. You have to tell them what exactly you need in a particular case and what you are going to provide them. You need to interact with them.

They should have some training courses. Usually, everything is available on YouTube today, but I have not found any videos for this solution. For training, there should be some sites or resources on YouTube or Udemy. They do not have that currently.

Feature-wise, I do not have any areas for improvement. Whenever we work for a company, they have certain restrictions, and we cannot use all the features of any MFT tool. In my previous company, we had a few restrictions, and the feature usage was limited, which made it hard to say if it lacked any features or not. I have not found any issues with most of the features I worked with. I could do whatever was required using GoAnywhere MFT.

I used this solution for four years and seven months.

GoAnywhere MFT is very good in terms of stability. You would not find many issues related to stability. If there are any issues, they are rare or once or twice a year.

We can easily scale up and scale down. If they want to use GoAnywhere MFT, most companies get it for a year. People usually do not scale down. They usually scale up because it has many services.

I believe it was being used at multiple locations because we had four servers. If any one of them went down, we had other servers.

I never contacted them. We had an on-site team for that, but I have attended calls with them. They are very prompt. They will schedule a meeting and help you out until the issue is resolved.

Positive

In the market, there are multiple MFT tools, but I only have experience working with GoAnywhere MFT. When I joined the company, GoAnywhere MFT was already there. I was trained on that and started working with it.

In my previous company, it was on the cloud. I was not involved in its deployment. It was already being used in my previous company. 

If you want to deploy it, you need to contact GoAnywhere. You can raise the ticket and ask them to provide that particular service. They will charge you and provide the service. 

I am not sure, but it seems that it does not require any maintenance. We just have to restart it, and we get all the updates and patching activities done.

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT a seven out of ten.

We use it to release medical records to other healthcare facilities, attorneys, and insurance companies.

We can share information faster and easier and in a less restrictive manner in terms of sizing.

It has helped to eliminate manual processes. We don't have to mail and fax records, and we don't have to burn them on a CD anymore. We can just drop a record in a folder.

It helps in centralizing the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners, which is extremely important. The easier it is to do, the better it is for us. Previously, we were having issues with faxing, and now, we don't have fax issues. It is a lot faster for the people to whom we're sending records. It is almost instantaneous, whereas with faxing, it has to go out through the fax, and then their fax machine has to pick it up, and then, on somebody's end, it may not work.

All of it is valuable, but the most valuable would be the ability to release medical records without having a limitation for size and not having to deal with the fax machine.

Its user interface is extremely easy. If you can drag and drop, then you're good.

I'm on the admin side of it, and one of the complaints is that it times out too quickly for the people who are using the internet-based part of it. It could be that there is a way to do it, but I just don't know how. 

One of the things that I wish is to not necessarily have to set up a username and password for people with whom we don't frequently share files. For instance, if I want to share files with a patient who is not somebody with whom we share files all the time, I would like them to somehow verify who they are and be able to push the file to them. I shouldn’t have to set them up as a user with a password. It should be almost like Dropbox.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

It is great. I haven't had any issues with it. I've had issues with my IT department, but nothing on the GoAnywhere's side.

I use it for a very specific thing. So, it definitely meets my needs.

They're fantastic. Anytime I've called to ask anything, they've always been extremely helpful. They spent time with me, walked me through things, and explained things to me. They've always been great. I've not had any issues. So, I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We didn't have any other solution previously. It was just fax and paper or burn a CD.

I was involved in its setup, and my part of it was simple. IT was also involved. There are portions of GoAnywhere that we're not using but IT can use. 

We were having issues with faxing to external people where our faxes wouldn't go through. So, in terms of the implementation strategy, they were the first ones with whom I checked whether they would be interested in doing this. It has just kind of grown from there. People request things from us all the time. If I'm on the phone, I ask them, "Hey, we have this. Is this something that you're interested in?" Sometimes, they say no, but most of the time, it is a yes. So, it has worked out really well.

I started using it in my department, and now, I've got a few other departments that are also using GoAnywhere for the same thing. For example, the business office will use it when people or attorneys request itemized statements or itemized billing if that requester has GoAnywhere.

I did have training courses. They did help me set up exactly what I needed it to be set up for, and that part was really simple.

In terms of maintenance, I'm the one who sets everybody up, and I'm the one who goes through it. Our IT has one person, but he is hardly in it. He usually accesses it when I have an issue. I do have four other staff members who drop things in, but they don't build users. They don't resend passwords or do anything like that.

I would like to say that we have seen an ROI because I don't have to burn CDs and mail them all the time, but I can't give a dollar figure for that.

The cost is fine. It is probably the best software that I've had for the money that we spend for it. I am not aware of any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. I don't pay for it. IT pays for it.

Our IT did look at other options. I know they looked at Dropbox, but I don't know what else they looked at.

GoAnywhere hasn't helped to eliminate single-function tools or unsecured file transfer methods because we work in medical records, and we don't send things in a non-secure fashion. I personally don't think that the mail is very secure. If we take the fact that we don't burn CDs anymore and we don't have to put them in the mail, then it has helped because now, it is from us to them, and there is no wait time. 

It hasn't enabled us to allocate staff toward other work, and it also hasn't enabled us to acquire or disseminate more data or more documents. It has only helped us to work more efficiently.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I tell people all the time that they need to get this. I was looking for something like this, and finally, I got it. I'm super happy about it. I don't want to have to go back to the way I was doing it before.

We use it for trading files with partners over the internet, partners with whom we don't have a VPN connection. And we use it for internal file movement and workflows.

We are using GoAnywhere for enterprise. We have two gateway nodes in both data centers.

From an automation standpoint, it helps us trade files over the internet with partners with whom we don't have a VPN connection. For the most part, GoAnywhere is used between us and partners that we trade files with. We consume those files with internal, backend processes and we use it for moving files within those backend processes, in the workflow. It has become very important to us over these four years. It's key in our workflow and our workload automation strategy.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. We write a few Python scripts here and there when we need to get fancy, but we can generally wire things up in GoAnywhere pretty quickly. It saves a lot of time and resources, making that ability pretty critical. We did a migration from SSIS to Informatica over the last two years, and my team wired up about 275 jobs during that time. Without GoAnywhere, that would have been a much more painful file management process.

With just shy of 500 jobs running in GoAnywhere, a conservative number would be half of our scripts, about 250, have been eliminated by centralizing things in this solution. And the automation of file transfers has helped to reduce workload in our organization by 20 percent.

Another thing that has been really important, with the ability to set SLAs on file arrivals, is that we have fundamentally set implied SLAs with our partners. That means that where we didn't really have a written agreement for an SLA on a given file, if over the last year a partner has sent us that file within X amount of time, we set the SLA alert to an hour later. That has meant we've pushed implied SLAs onto our providers.

File monitors are one of the most valuable features. We have about 400 file monitors running in GoAnywhere. They monitor the NAS locations where files arrive, and they kick off workflows. When a file arrives, GoAnywhere will identify that the file is there, move it to a consumption zone, then reach out to our enterprise scheduler through a REST API call.

The solution helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners. It's very central and that's pretty important. We generally move about 3,000 files a day, between our partners and internal workflows.

My team really likes the intuitiveness of GoAnywhere's user interface. For example, my automation team has a file coming in from a bank, a file that needs to be unzipped, reformatted, re-zipped up, and then put into another folder where another team is going to consume it. Because of all the progressive elaboration—the project started a year ago—the format of the file is not the same. We addressed it with GoAnywhere instead of having the producer of the file change the format. That's how flexible it is for us.

And looking at the comprehensiveness of GoAnywhere's workflow features, we use it pretty extensively for working with files. Stonebranch is our enterprise automation platform, but we don't really do any file work with Stonebranch. We chose to use GoAnywhere, our MFT tool, to move and manipulate files.

The solution also connects to popular ICAP servers and that's pretty important to our security guys when it comes to preventing malware and other malicious content from entering our organization. The connection to popular ICAP servers, so that content is inspected for sensitive information like credit cards, is pretty important. We're a financial institution and a lot of the data we work with has PAN data and card numbers in it, coming in from partners.

There's one persnickety issue about NAS permissions. That is a problem we have run into with GoAnywhere. I would like to see more focus on compatibility with/enforcement of user roles and access permissions across NAS, among other things. We have filed a couple of tickets on that in the past.

We've been on HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for about four years.

It's rock-solid. I can't remember the last time we had a GoAnywhere outage.

It's well-architected. With the frontend gateway servers and the backend servers, you can scale to meet your needs. We're not anywhere near having to address that point, but if we got to a point where we needed to scale, we could just put another gateway server and another application server in play, and that would be able to take on more traffic. It's easily scalable.

The help has always been great. Anytime we have had an issue, the response has been good and they've been on top of it. We're pretty happy with the support.

Positive

We were a Cisco Tidal house before we went to Stonebranch and GoAnywhere. We made the decision to put GoAnywhere in when we bought the new automation platform, instead of going with Stonebranch's file movement platform. We went with GoAnywhere because it met more of our needs, especially when it comes to trading files with partners over the internet. That really wasn't the focus of Stonebranch, which was really just for the workflows.

The initial setup was a piece of cake. And upgrading the platform and dropping the .jar files has been really painless as well. By comparison, my IBM upgrades take four hours.

The return on investment was in the initial purchase, as it was 30 percent less than the other product we looked at.

The ease of use and learnability of the interface also help. It took my guys no time to learn the interface and the product, and to start turning out value, working with it in workflows. The learning curve was short. It didn't take a lot of training. The time to value was great, and that is great ROI.

GoAnywhere was the most attractively priced product that met our needs. In our PoC it really came down to MOVEit and GoAnywhere, and GoAnywhere's pricing was about 30 percent less.

GoFast is an additional license. We're not using it but we might. We're all going to be hybrid at some point in time and I'm getting my arms wrapped around it. Do I put a file replication solution in place that's bi-directional, like Peer? Or do I put GoAnywhere out in AWS with a high-speed adapter so that I can send files from on-prem to AWS where compute is happening for ETLs?

We have three MFT platforms in-house. One is IBM Sterling File Gateway and we use that to move about 15,000 files a day. But that's really B2C, with our 2,400 or credit unions. We move files from Fiserv and other vendors, and from PSU, to the institutions through IBM File Gateway.

Before going with GoAnywhere, we looked at Axway, Ipswitch, and MOVEit. We did a PoC with Ipswitch, MOVEit, and GoAnywhere, and went with GoAnywhere. The products did the same thing but GoAnywhere had a better interface than MOVEit, and the price was more attractive. I hear that Ipswitch was bought out and is called something else now.

Make sure you size it properly.

Also, in the grand scheme of things, what I've learned is that you don't have to be on an IBM platform or Ipswitch, or Axway—the big names, the competitors. One of the players in the industry that is a little smaller, like HelpSystems, has a product that gets the job done for less money. We're really not that big as far as revenue goes. We're less than a billion-dollar-a-year corporation, with 2,500 people. But we are a not-for-profit and we work with Fiserv so we have a lot of IBM footprint on the ground. That is not typical of a company that is doing less than a billion dollars a year. Traditionally, the mentality is to just use the big-name products, Big Blue and HPE, but that is just not necessary. That's one of the valuable things that I've learned. GoAnywhere gets the job done for a lot less money than the big traditionals.

Our users include three guys who are automation engineers and two guys who are MFT engineers. We also have a handful of folks, four or five, in the network operations center, who do ad hoc file-sends to credit unions.

Overall, it's a great product.

Our business is, as far as corporate computing goes, is IBM i-centric. Because of that, some of the main use cases for the GoAnywhere product are for uploading data into the IBM i, from our finance department and other departments, and downloading data from the IBM i to a user or to our FTP server to be sent to a business partner. And when it comes to downloading data for users, it's typically in the form of Excel reports.

At this point, we are only accessing resources within our organization. We don't reach outside of our organization, even though the solution enables interaction with many things, such as Amazon and Google. The exceptions to that are one or two processes that do reach out to a business partner by way of SFTP.

One of the things GoAnywhere can do for us that our previous product could not is error handling. If something doesn't work properly, we can be alerted to that fact and act on it more quickly, versus the old product.

The workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers. They simplify activities surrounding the movement of data. There is a concept within IBM i of normal tables and an aspect referred to as the integrated file system or IFS. Our older processes would typically create data in a table and run special commands that might make it troublesome to copy that data from the table to the IFS. From there, the old product would grab it from the IFS and send it to some other server. Now, we can eliminate that step of having to bother with the IFS, since GoAnywhere can reach directly into our tables. It's one more aspect of this product that helps simplify these sorts of tasks. When users say, "I'm building spreadsheets that I would like to be uploaded on a regular basis into the IBM i," we are able to accommodate that request within a matter of hours rather than the days it would take to create programs to do that. That is very useful. It has eliminated several dozens of scripts for us.

And when it comes to file uploads into the IBM i, this is only a guess, but it has saved us on the order of five hours per week.

We're able to craft solutions to little challenges faster, and that makes us more productive. One of the GoAnywhere projects that I was just helping a person with yesterday was updating an old program that produces a report for a user. I helped her create an SQL view and then make use of that view with GoAnywhere, which now emails a simple spreadsheet to the user. She was able to accomplish that in a fraction of the time it would have taken to modify the original program.

Additionally, the workflow features have helped to eliminate manual processes. One example is an upload process that is being done regularly by the payroll department. It typically involved a little more manual activity on the part of our payroll user to get us the data. Whereas now, with GoAnywhere, we are able to create something using what GoAnywhere calls a Secure Form. It enables us to present a very quick, very rudimentary webpage to the user where they do a few clicks and the file is provided to us. That is in contrast to their having to take the file from their desktop, find the network share that they're supposed to copy it to, followed by calling us to say they've copied it over there. It makes it easier for users to do things on their own, once we've created that ability for them.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to reach into our database tables on the IBM i, and other platforms, and extract data. That is most useful for us.

It's also easy to use. I was training somebody yesterday on some of the finer points of GoAnywhere, and she found it very easy to interact with and understand. We like the interface.

The workflow features are very comprehensive, from our point of view. GoAnywhere uses the term "project" for a job that we create within it. The projects can be run from our IBM i CL [command language] programs. They can be scheduled within the GoAnywhere Scheduler to run once an hour or whenever we need them to run. A process can also be triggered by a file showing up. It is robust in terms of how the GoAnywhere projects can be invoked.

It doesn't need much improvement, other than tiny idiosyncrasies. I've run into one or two things for which I've put in change requests to the software developers at GoAnywhere, but they are very minor things, the types of things that don't come up much. We've created in the neighborhood of 80 to 90 projects in GoAnywhere and, out of all of those, there have only been a couple where we've run into something and that made us say, "I wish they could improve this little thing here."

For example, when it comes to interacting with files, there is a function referred to as write CSV, to write a general text file. In this scenario of creating a simple text file, I ran into a situation where, if the product saw a quote or a double-quote in the data, it started wrapping all the text fields in double-quotes. The request I put in asks them to provide a feature that leaves my data alone and does not interpret anything. If I don't want double quotes, please don't put them in. It should have the option, on certain write CSV operations, of not inferring anything.

We have been using HelpSystems GoAnywhere MFT for about a year.

It seems pretty stable. Like other Windows platform solutions, every once in a while the Windows platform needs to be rebooted, but otherwise it has been very stable.

Scalability has been a non-issue for us. It seems like we could double or triple the number of projects we've got, which might happen over the next five or 10 years. We do not expect any issues with the scalability.

We don't have any plans, per se, to increase our usage of GoAnywhere, but something that we haven't talked about is another product we have that is going to have some competition from GoAnywhere. This other product, which I believe is owned by HelpSystems as well, is a reporting tool called Sequel Viewpoint. I've used it in a similar fashion to the way we use GoAnywhere: A user needs a report and I create an SQL view, go into Sequel Viewpoint, make use of that view and output a PDF or Excel document, and email it to the user. Doing the same thing in GoAnywhere is easier.

It's not so much that there are any specific plans for increased usage, but those types of tasks just come up from time to time. When a user in our finance, buyers, or our supply chain and planning department needs some data from our system, we have a solution for them very quickly using GoAnywhere to produce a simple Excel report.

The technical support has been fine. It has been useful each time we've reached out to them, unless we find a little bug, like the one I mentioned where the product had decided on its own to put double quotes around all of the text fields. Short of little idiosyncrasies like that, they've been able to solve problems for us.

We migrated off of a very rudimentary product that was little more than a file moving product. It was "garage software," meaning it was made by a very small organization. It was called Second Copy. It could move or copy a file from one server to another within the same file system, but it was very basic. There was no error handling, no ability to deal with FTP and IBM i, HTTP,  databases, Amazon, and Azure. All those capabilities were nonexistent in Second Copy. GoAnywhere is like a Ferrari versus a Volkswagen Beetle. Our old product was a single-function tool, and GoAnywhere helped us to eliminate it.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward except for one feature, which was an integration to the IBM i. As luck would have it, we've never actually ended up using that feature. It's what is called setting up an agent on the IBM i, and that took a bit of work with one of their tech support people. That allows for a little tighter integration with the IBM i when the product has been installed off of the IBM i. In our case, we installed the product on a Windows Server, as opposed to the IBM i itself. We figured that if we make use of the agent, it might give us a little better integration. Now, eight or nine months later, we've never made use of that IBM i agent. What made adding that agent complex was due to the nuance. The instructions were not clear enough and I was not able to do it by following instructions in the manual.

Not counting that agent, we had GoAnywhere up and running on the same day that we started installing it. The agent was just an add-on, and that dragged on for a few more days with interaction back and forth with their tech support.

We were replacing an existing product. Our implementation strategy was a matter of setting up GoAnywhere and doing a couple of pilot projects to see how easy it was and how it worked. We then started the process of converting 70 or 80 tasks out of the old product, slowly but surely, into the new product. That was doled out to half a dozen developers who looked at the existing tasks and implemented something similar, and/or better, in GoAnywhere.

Our user community for GoAnywhere is relatively small at the moment. We are a medium-size retail business. Our corporate headcount would be somewhere between 400 and 500 people, and the total headcount within the company is 1,100 to 1,200 people, including stores and warehouses. Out of all of them, there are just a handful of departments that we interact with a lot. Our finance and our planning/supply chain departments are two of our major users among our user community of about a dozen users.

As for maintenance of GoAnywhere, our IT department has three groups: web development, back office development, and technical support. This product can be used by, and of value to, all three IT groups. It is almost exclusively used by just the back office department, which I'm part of. Our focus is the IBM i, versus our customer-facing web pages which are handled by our web development folks. In our back office group, we've got about 20 developers and any one of them can do a project in GoAnywhere. We don't have anybody dedicated to maintaining the product. As a task comes up, somebody gets assigned to do it and takes care of it.

We didn't use a third-party. It was a straightforward install for the most part.

The cost of GoAnywhere versus the value it brings to our data transfer operations is reasonable. When I compare it to what we were using, that product called Second Copy, and how robust it is and how productive we can be with it, the cost is commensurate. The cost is relatively expensive but, back to the car analogy, that's to be expected with a Ferrari.

They provided a variety of options for pricing. "If you want just this basic feature, here's the price. Or you can have this add-on and that add-on." That variety of add-ons is useful because we are not using it to its fullest capabilities. Some of those other capabilities are licensed extra options.

One of the extra add-ons that came to our attention that we ended up purchasing, and that has provided value and will continue to provide value, is the Secure Forms. We use them to very quickly provide a web page interface for a user to make file transfers easier for them. It's also very useful when there's a report that they need but we need some input from them to produce it, like the date range of the data they want to see, or the particular stores they want a report for. Secure Forms are an extra cost and we went for that extra cost months after buying the initial product. We started with not much in the way of extras, and then added onto the product.

We are using it for Managed File Transfer and secure FTP and BGP processes for incoming and outgoing files. We also move data inside of the network using the GoAnywhere agent between servers, and we have also used the scripting capabilities of GoAnywhere for the change in a file's name and other things.

GoAnywhere MFT helps centralize the exchange of data between systems, employees, customers, and trading partners.

The interface of GoAnywhere MFT is good. It is easy to use. It is clear. The help is very good.

GoAnywhere’s workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfer. It is very important for us because normally when you receive the file, you need to perform a lot of work to be sure that you can deliver or integrate with the backend. It helps to have the capabilities for automation or manipulation of the files through the workflows.

GoAnywhere’s workflow features help to eliminate manual processes, especially processes related to encryption using BGP.

It is very easy to use. It is easy to create projects in a graphical environment. The configuration and the setup of the environment is very easy. In general, the use of the software is very simple. It is clear, and it is one of the best products. 

It is very simple to use, and it is powerful. The configuration is very flexible in terms of the protocols and algorithms for encryption and security configuration.

In some cases, the logs need deeper information. In terms of communication and checking, they need to go a little deeper.

In some scenarios, when you are in a cluster environment, the load-balancing capabilities of the gateway need to be improved a little. This functionality needs some improvement.

In general, workflow features are good, but when you need to use the transformation capabilities, there are some problems in terms of the way they manage the resources of the machine. There are some limitations in the size of the file, so the transformation capability has to be improved. 

I have been using this solution for 3 years.

Their support needs improvement. We have a partner, but we are not receiving a quick response. I do not know if the customers have the same experience, but in our opinion, it needs some improvement in terms of the response time. I would rate their support a 7 out of 10.

Neutral

We work with some IBM products, such as IBM Sterling File Gateway. In some scenarios, it is as powerful as GoAnywhere MFT, but it is much more complex to use and set up. GoAnywhere MFT is easier. IBM has an advantage in terms of support of Connect:Direct, which is a proprietary protocol. It is a very strong protocol. It is one of the differentiators of IBM.

Its deployment is very easy.

We are not making a calculation, but it depends on the kind of file you are moving. In some cases, if the file does not go through, you could have problems with the logistics, but I do not have a number for the return on investment.

It is very attractive. In terms of the capacity of the product and functionality, it is a good price. Considering its capabilities, its price is good. 

We know GoAnywhere has the capability to connect to popular ICAP servers, but we are not using any.

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT a 9 out of 10.

We selected GoAnywhere to replace an on-prem custom-built C# ASP.net solution that we had inherited as a part of an acquisition of another company. We didn't want to maintain that solution in-house, so we searched for third-party providers that might offer some MFT solutions with EDI as a bonus. GoAnywhere checked all of our boxes. It was an easy choice in terms of costs, features, and support. 

Right now, I have three teams working with it: analytics developers, data engineers, and software developers. We're a pretty small house. There are four people in software development. The analytics team is supposed to have six, but we're currently at four. We should have two data engineers, but we now have one.

We have not yet implemented their FTP server. We own it but haven't installed it yet. We purchased the FTP portion of the software about six months ago because we were looking to replace our internal FTP solution. It was a project that we put on the back burner. After seeing the MFT product and how it performed, we felt pretty confident that we could migrate to their FTP platform as well. We were pleased with their support and performance on MFT, so it made sense for us to consolidate FTP into GoAnywhere.

One of the ways it has improved how we function is centralization, but that was somewhat of an unintended consequence. The initial purchase was intended to replace a specific application, but at least three other teams are currently using the application to move data internally within our network or to external providers. 

It has provided a layer of transparency across the business, particularly for our IT staff, allowing teams to see what others are working on. Even though I may not have worked on a package that interfaces with our buying software, I can see the packets out there. I can see who built the packet and what's in it. If they're not there and something goes wrong, we can troubleshoot across teams. It also creates opportunities for cross-training and cross-team support. 

I can't say that GoAnywhere's workflow features have eliminated any manual processes because the solution it replaced was already automated, so there weren't necessarily manual processes there. However, it has also allowed us to onboard other projects because the automation method is easy. 

It's hard to quantify the direct impact GoAnywhere has had on our operations because so much of it is behind the scenes. Our end-users just know that the data is flowing, so that reliability is something they won't notice. I also wouldn't say that it eliminated workloads per se because we merely moved from one system to another. But if we were starting with no automated solution in place, it would significantly reduce the workload. Of course, it would depend on the workload you're attempting to replace. From a monitoring and design perspective, it could potentially cut your workload in half. GoAnywhere hasn't helped us shift staff members to other tasks because we're a pretty lean shop, to begin with. Our plates are full regardless.

The user interface is highly intuitive, which has streamlined migration from our old solution. I say that with the caveat that we're a pretty technical house, so we have a reasonably strong skill set. When we were doing the demo, we took one project from the old system and got it running in GoAnywhere in less than 30 minutes. That says a lot. I've written queries and understand code, so I'm not a novice. I still think that's pretty impressive for a software product to be able to deliver a functional use case in half an hour.

GoAnywhere's workflow features eliminate the need for custom programs and scripts for file transfers, which was pretty critical, given the software we were replacing. While it was an internally built application, a custom script was written for each interface that had to be maintained long-term. So to convert those to a system that could build, maintain, and scale those functions out of the box was pretty critical for us.

There have been a few things that GoAnywhere couldn't handle. We discovered one recently that was beyond the scope of our original requirements. API functionality wasn't part of our initial unit testing because it wasn't necessary then. However, shortly after implementing GoAnywhere, two different vendors approached us to do API transactions. We checked to see if GoAnywhere could do this and found that it was supposed to have that capability, but it broke down. It completed the transaction, but it didn't correctly parse the JSON. Specifically, heavily nested JSON files break down when it attempts to parse the data.

There's a workaround. You have to reorganize the JSON file, and then GoAnywhere can read it. We went in a different direction since we didn't want to be hacking our solution. Their JSON readers aren't fully developed. When we implemented it, their EDI was in its infancy. We've been very successful with the EDI implementation, but there are a few pieces in their EDI implementation that are a little bit clunky. 

We had a meeting with them a couple of weeks ago because they're looking to advance that side of the product and wanted our input on what we would change in the EDI section. We gave it to them. It's an area they are looking to develop. I would recommend they continue to build in that space.

We purchased GoAnywhere about a year and a half ago, but we've only been actively using it for the last nine months. After buying it, we put off implementation because we were in the middle of a massive integration. We had about 67 different applications undergoing migration, so GoAnywhere just had to wait its turn.

So far, GoAnywhere has been highly stable. We've had minimal downtime, and the downtime we've had has been due to other system upgrades. For example, we upgraded our internal FTP server but neglected to open the firewall ports after the upgrade back to the GoAnywhere server. That's more of a systems issue rather than a problem with GoAnywhere. I can confidently say GoAnywhere has been up 99.9 percent of the time since we first installed it.

GoAnywhere allows us to continue expanding our data integrations because we already had a pretty robust integration across the board before we implemented it, and it continues to scale well. When a new vendor comes on board with new specs or a new type of connection, 99 percent of the time we can say that GoAnywhere can do that, and we start building out the implementation and the automation process.

We continue to grow, and we haven't seen any performance issues yet. We had a few problems with logs, but that was resolved in 20 minutes with a call to support about where we store our logs and how we make them more efficient. At this point, we probably have roughly 200 jobs running daily. Some of them monitor files, a folder, or an FTP site every five minutes 24 hours, seven days a week without any significant performance degrades.

The individuals who provide support are very knowledgeable about their product, and we don't go through multiple layers of support. We get answers fairly quickly, and it escalates to the right person quickly as well if needed. I would rate HelpSytems support nine out of 10.

Positive

The setup was very straightforward. Of course, we paid for training, but it's an intuitive application. The time-to-value was closer to a month. It took us about a month before we had value-producing projects running. 

Regarding maintenance, we maintain it in a hybrid sense. Because we're such a small shop, I and someone from the software development team have admin access to the servers, and so does our systems administration team. It's more like cross-training. The solution requires minimal maintenance. It is a solidly performing application, so we don't see a lot of issues or downtime.

The updates all go smoothly. When there's an update, we're relatively confident that we can apply this. We've gone through enough release cycles that we know a new release won't break stuff. We'll roll it out, and our software's back up 30 minutes later.

A lot of our data streams are revenue-related. We're sending invoices to customers so that they can automate payments. Often, that's contractually based but roughly 30 percent of our customer-facing business involves data integrations. Without GoAnywhere, we would potentially lose business if we couldn't meet the contractual obligations of data transfers.

We looked at four different products about a year and a half ago, and GoAnywhere came out on top. One of the solutions we looked at was Microsoft SSRS. We are a Microsoft shop, so that's one we looked at, and we checked out Azure Logic Apps. We also got estimates from a third-party software development company to develop a custom solution.

To make the final decision, we looked at a few factors. The cost was a big one for us. We weren't willing to spend a ton of money replacing this particular product. But the other one was what we call "feature completeness." Specifically, we needed to do managed file transfers with our vendor partners. We wanted to custom-build our queries using SQL and DB2, connect to various sources to generate files, and then transfer those files via FTP, SFTP, or any number of different connection mechanisms.

We also had some EDI that was a part of a different software implementation but super expensive. That ended up being a bonus of GoAnywhere. They had recently started implementing some EDI functionality at a much lower cost.

In its class, I'd give GoAnywhere MFT a nine out of 10. It does what it does exceedingly well. If you're implementing GoAnywhere, I recommend taking advantage of their support and training. It's excellent. Even if you already have a solid technical background, you'll have some "aha" moments just learning how they built the application. From my perspective, the cost of training is minuscule compared to the return. It gives you a good understanding of how the software works as well as how to build and troubleshoot workflows.