Today’s CIO knows that the key to efficient IT is modernization, innovation and risk reduction. With such an overwhelming array of MFT, B2B and EAI environment products and solutions available on the market today, the answer is consolidation. For more than 25 years, SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (SEE BIS) been trusted by more than 8,500 customers across the globe to help them achieve that goal.

• Leading Technology Company: This global computer manufacturer was able to replace multiple products with the end-to-end platform of SEE BIS — something none of our competitors were able to do. The replaced products cost $510 thousand annually before administrative expenses.
• Automotive Supplier: As one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, Magna wanted to consolidate its global information network. SEE BIS allowed Magna to cut costs by supporting consolidation of all formats and business processes with complete integration in six months.
• Retailer: One of Switzerland’s largest retailers, Coop was able to meet the demand set by a rapid doubling of EDI partners and processes with SEE BIS. The solution met Coop’s OS requirements and enabled direct integration with sister companies through various BIS integration points.

With just a single platform, SEE BIS provides 100 percent integration. Learn more today by reading our complimentary white paper, Modernization and Consolidation of Existing B2B Landscapes.

Today’s CIOs share similar challenges, regardless of vertical industry, geographic location or company size:

1. Cost Reduction
2. Drive Core Revenue – making IT a revenue center rather than cost center
3. Reducing Risk

These problems can be addressed with the following solutions:

1. Consolidation to reduce costs
2. Modernization to drive revenue
3. Data security to reduce risk

Today, I want to share with you some information about the cost reduction that can be achieved with the right Consolidation and Modernization strategy.

We interviewed a global sampling of our customers to learn how they stay competitive in today’s economy.  The findings show that by consolidating and modernizing their EDI/B2B along with file transfer technologies on a single unified platform like the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS), they were able to cut application and project costs by up to 80% while maintaining high levels of satisfaction of internal and external partners*.

These well run companies also achieved the following savings by modernizing their EDI/B2B and large file transfer environments:

• Operating and maintenance staff costs                             50%
• Creating new B2B/EDI interfaces                                      65%
• Software maintenance costs                                              60%
• Search costs (status, errors, document tracking)              96%
• Transfer costs                                                                     30%

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing practical tips for how you can achieve similar savings for your organization, grow your business and reduce risks.  In the meantime, for more information, pls visit us at www.seeburger.com/modernization-consolidation

* (Survey done with International automobile suppliers, ODETTE conference, 2011).

Many of us today are managing a wide selection of business integration, file transfer and process management software and applications. Like a poker hand with a bunch of ill-matched cards, a wide range of IT solutions from different companies just won’t get you where you need to be. Instead, a grab bag of solutions tends to leave you inflexible. It’s costly to maintain and manage, and not likely to integrate well with SAP.

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (SEE BIS) is a centralized integration platform that lowers operating costs, improves customer satisfaction and alleviates risks. Along with a precision-engineered platform and complete set of integration tools, you’ll have the peace of mind that comes from knowing SEEUBURGER is a long-time strategic SAP partner. SEE BIS provides:

• Pre-defined, standardized SAP solutions and content on a single platform
• Real-time, relevant information from a central location in SAP
• Industry-specific content and components that support SAP best practices

Visit our solution page to learn more about risk-free modernization and consolidation. Discover what SEE BIS can do to meet your SAP integration needs — and more.

We caught up with Brian to discuss the significance of this appointment:

1. What is the AIAG committee that you’ve been invited to join?
   I have been placed on the Global Engineering and IT Steering Committee of AIAG and will initially be serving as a member of the Supplier Connectivity Workgroup. The GE&IT Steering Committee and its work groups proactively identify industry issues, needs, and trends both inside and outside the industry. Strategic issues are prioritized and innovative solutions are developed to address the challenges with emphasis on reducing cost and complexity while improving quality, health, and safety. The team approach to problem solving optimizes our ability to bring solutions to market quickly.
2. Given your industry experience and knowledge you bring from SEEBURGER, how will you contribute in this role?
   The Automotive industry is complex and confronts unique challenges. OEM’s and Suppliers must work together in a highly choreographed, harmonious fashion. Efficient and effective communication between people, processes, and technology is critical. SEEBURGER has been delivering solutions that address the needs of this industry for over 25 years providing 100% Trading Partner and Business Process Integration from a single technology platform. Our solutions solve complex integration requirements for Business-to-Business, Enterprise Application Integration, and Managed File Transfer. We are pragmatic leaders in the development of Automotive best business practices. SEEBURGER’s strong, global industry experience along with my personal knowledge will contribute innovative ideas, advice, counsel to the GE&IT Steering Committee for establishing future direction and developing solutions.
3. What role does this committee and the work group play in advancing the automotive industry?
   The charter of the GE&IT Steering Committee is to drive engineering, design, IT, manufacturing and data (quality, integrity, and exchange) standards, interoperability, and conventions that address issues critical to achieving a global collaborative Automotive supply chain. Solutions developed by the committee are delivered in the form of educational seminars, articles, technical sessions, guidelines, implementation guidelines, white papers, pilots, and standards.  The solutions developed serve as a roadmap for industry best practices and future direction.

For further details, read the recent press release.

The good news is Managed File Transfer (MFT) is here to stay. The bad news is you’re wondering what the heck MFT is. Welcome to MFT 101, your intro to all that is Managed File Transfer.

Simply put, MFT is a solution for sending files of any size automatically and securely. Using software and secure communications protocols, MFT provides monitoring and tracking capabilities, and unties the binds that FTP has placed upon your IT staff. With MFT, your IT department is freed from having to perform redundant, time-consuming file transfer management tasks.

MFT address the common problems faced by today’s business user who is trying to send or receive important files — incredibly large file sizes, solutions that require IT management and unreliable connections with business partners. Along with speeding transmission time, ensuring greater compliance and reducing business risk, MFT helps lower costs. You’ll spend less on transferring data, dedicated IT resources and training end users.

MFT has plenty of features not seen in other file transfer solutions. It offers unique reporting, tracking and monitoring features, the ability to filter content, workflow rules that ensure data integrity, and file transfer and management versioning capabilities that prevent duplication or data loss.

Now that you’ve had a brief intro to MFT, I encourage you to dive in a little deeper with our complimentary white paper, Streamline, Speed and Secure the Supply Chain with Managed File Transfer.

While Managed File Transfer (MFT) has many things to offer, its greatest value can be distilled from the three most significant problems it helps eliminate.

1. Gargantuan size files: File sizes today are out of control. A single graphic can be 100 MB and many a PowerPoint presentation has been known to creep towards the 20 MB range. Sending files of this size through your email is like asking your outbox to work as slowly as possible. MFT speeds transmission times for data sent through email and provides a secure Web portal as an alternative method for sending files.
2. Overdependence on IT: Many departments are stretched thin today — and IT is no exception. So when IT staff is spending hours having to manually manage the transfer of files and data sent through FTP, it means they’re not spending hours working on problems that only IT can fix. MFT allows everyday business users to securely send files, while helping IT to automatically ensure data transfers follow business policies.
3. Real-world logistics: Some of your partners may reside in certain areas of the world with network connections that would be perfect, for the North Pole. Unreliable connections can make data transmission slow or fail altogether, and sporadic connectivity makes tracking difficult to say the least. MFT provides a cost-effective infrastructure for secure data transfers outside the firewall with partners of any size.

To learn more about how MFT solves these problems and more, read our complimentary white paper, Streamline, Speed and Secure the Supply Chain with Managed File Transfer.

SEEBURGER Secure Link (SEE Link), the newest addition to our Managed File Transfer suite, was unveiled yesterday at the Gartner Summit in Las Vegas. It’s a moment worth mentioning, as SEE Link provides a sound alternative to the conventional file sharing methods that have plagued many with risk for years.

“Enterprises not only need to be sure that the right data gets to the right place at the right time but also must be able to prove it for audit and compliance purposes. For most organizations, this is not only a challenge but a major drain on IT resources,” Rohit Khanna, SEEBURGER global strategy and corporate development executive vice president said.

Enter SEE Link. With several industry-first features, SEE Link can significantly reduce administrative overhead and the risk of exchanging files with partners lacking B2B/EDI capabilities. It not only helps ensure secure, easy-to-manage internal and external data exchange, it has built-in policy enforcement, encryption and data integrity checking capabilities.

These features and a central audit trail help prevent data loss, and ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate requirements. And as an added bonus, SEE Link’s user-friendly, browser-based interface is perfect for those with little IT experience. Read the press release to learn more about how SEE Link is different and what it has to offer.

In 2010, Energie Baden-Württemberg AG (EnBW) – Germany’s third-largest energy provider, which has around six million customers and employs than 20,000 people – recorded an annual turnover in excess of 17 billion euros.  The company focuses primarily on electricity (with activities in the fields of generation, retailing, grid and supply), gas and energy and environmental services. EnBW has been using SEEBURGER’s Business Integration Server (BIS) as an integration solution for its market communication since 1999. And for secure, transparent data transfers with external partners, EnBW also uses one of its Managed File Transfer (MTF) solutions. The company finds these solutions equally beneficial to operate.

Managed File Transfer: extra benefits, added value

This SEEBURGER MFT solution ensures that data can only be accessed by the intended recipient and therefore remains extremely secure. For confidential data, the solution establishes a direct connection between the sender and the recipient, who then has to decrypt the file at the other end before opening it. The sender remains in complete control of which file goes to which recipient, thereby avoiding any unauthorized downloads. The files never appear on any email servers, so there is no extra burden on the network and administration is kept to a minimum. The MFT solution is managed centrally, which enables the IT department to adapt it at any time to suit the company’s requirements; for example it can be scaled up if the partner network grows in size. This also helps to optimize the use of internal IT resources. EnBW is now planning to speed up and simplify overall communications even more – by uncoupling the solution from the current platform and integrating it directly into the existing platform as a plug-in.

For more information, please visit www.seeburger.com/mft

Today, SEEBURGER announced a  joint solution with Solace Systems that delivers the very best in business to business integration (B2B) and Managed File Transfer (MFT) coupled with an extremely fast enterprise bus that is easy to setup and dramatically lowers operational costs. Together, they provide a solution to meet industry specific needs. Financial services firms exist in a highly regulated environment and are pushed to the limit by processing millions of transactions per day. Telecommunications companies play in a very competitive space and are looking for ways to optimize their performance. In the energy market, smart meters are being rolled out to millions of locations. Each smart meter produces multiple messages per day translating into a ton of traffic for energy companies to keep track of.

SEEBURGER’s strength lies in its capability to connect any system to any other system inside or outside of an organization and support any data type whether it’s structured or unstructured. Solace System’s strength is its appliance-based high performance messaging bus that can process 10 to 100 times the amount of message of any of its competitors while at the same time supporting ease of use (put it into the rack and turn it on) and lower cost of ownership (Would you rather pay for operating system licenses, maintenance fees, cooling costs, etc for 100 servers or for 10 Solace Systems appliances that require next to no maintenance?)

Together, SEEBURGER and Solace Systems Joint Solution provides the fastest, most scalable, compliant, and accurate way for communicating, collaborating, and integrating with internal and external partners, customers, and vendors globally while lowering total cost of ownership.

Those large files you’re sharing, they’re not as secure as you may think they are. Large files sent around organizations through FTP lack the security measures small files protected by content-aware software have. Basically, they’re in danger of regulatory violations and data breaches.

That’s where our managed file transfer (SEE MFT) platform comes in. Just how does SEE MFT ensure security and regulatory compliance? For starters, it interfaces with all SAP solutions and many email and document management systems seamlessly. It also provides:

• Encryption and authentication of file transfers
• Checkpoint and restart capabilities to ensure delivery
• Rule-based routing and workflows that ensure policies
• A complete audit trail of data exchange activity

SEE MFT reduces the total cost of ownership by consolidating transfers on a central platform and eliminating the expense of managing multiple FTP solutions. SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite users don’t need additional infrastructure — just a license key to get started.

Read our article about SEE MFT from the latest issue of SAPInsider to learn more.