Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct can be deployed in many ways. We mainly deploy it on-premise, because the cloud and hybrid deployments are more recent. It's has been in the last five years that they have been implementing the cloud and hybrid versions. I had been installing and providing services in a hybrid role with containers, on-premise, public cloud, and private cloud for different customers.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is an MFT solution, and in this case, IBM offers the same solution that can also work for B2B, such as file translation. These are solutions that are independent of the industry of the customer. For example, I live in Spain and the target market was finance. I work on several different finance customers with some specific use cases. In Italy, for example, I work with logistics, distribution, manufacturing and the use case are different. In the financial sector, we propose the MFT solution to banks in corporate areas to get the onboarding of the customers of the banks. It allows each bank to propose to their customer a file sent automatically using each type of protocol and providing a lot of facilities. If we talk with the logistic or distribution departments they are most focused on EDI messages to interchange with their providers, such as orders, invoices, and dispatch advisement.
With IBM it is on the same solution. Depending on the target market where we move on, we can identify a different business case. In the last two years in the financial market, consider that there is a huge migration of standards related to SWIFT. All the banks around the world must translate their MT messages, SWIFT messages, to ISO 20022. We are proposing a combination of the MFT solution with the ITX, that is the IBM mapper. This is the use case most used in the last two years, more or less.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is a solution that is on the market for a very long time. There is an integrator that has been developed and evolves every year. On the roadmap, there is always a new integration. For example, it's one of the solutions in the market that out of the box can handle EBICS protocol. The file processing is done very well. By default, there are a lot of configurations that can be customized.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is one of the stronger MFT solutions in the market, it is available in each type of installation, and offers SaaS, PaaS, YaaS, on-premise. It can allow the customer to do everything on the file interchange.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct could improve by adding some of the functionality that some other vendors have. For example, GoAnywhere has call agents, which are small clients that can be installed on the endpoints and can be handled by the central point on the server. If I want to do this with the IBM solution, I have to sell a lot of account addresses. The price could be unprofitable for the customer. There is some small functionality that could be implemented and could be easily done to improve this solution.
I have been using Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct for 15 years.
Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is stable vertically and horizontally.
This solution is scalable both horizontally and vertically. While using containers it's automatically scalable. For example, by using Kubernetes. I can add many clusters. I can power on the system that was implemented and I can tune the solution in order to use more resources of the system.
In the first two, three years that I used the solution after IBM acquired it, we had some issues because the technical team was not skilled. We had some more delays with technical resolutions. After three or four years, we did not have any large issues. On the new development, we have some issues with the use cases. For example, in the integration of Kafka, we don't have a lot of experience. We did not get a lot of information from the support about how it should work, or how it is normally supported to work. Overall the support we have received has been good.
I have used many other solutions, such as GoAnywhere or HelpSystem. When comparing this solution to GoAnywhere, we have to customize everything but in Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct it's not necessary.
The on-premise deployment it's quite easy to install. For example, the new load has little impact on the workflow of the projects that are running.
The price and licensing of Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct is expensive. The containers can allow the customer to have flexibility in the ability to move the container on the cloud. They have to purchase all the containers that they need. Even if most of them can be switched off, it's quite expensive compared with the other offering. The other offering that is related to PBU and based on the power of the machines, sometimes it's quite expensive for the use case that we found. Other vendors, such as Primero, which sold specific license packages, such as by protocol, are most competitive than the licensing of IBM.
I used to offer this solution when the customer had more than one use case. One business case, or some business case with a lot of budgets or a lot of revenue. Otherwise, I used to propose different solutions, such as Software AG, AppSystem, or Primero, that are good challengers because they are smaller solutions for smaller businesses and use cases.
I rate Sterling Commerce Connect:Direct an eight out of ten.
