IBM Blockchain Platform vs. SAP Integration Suite

IBM Blockchain Platform is well suited for scenarios where you need secure transactions, like in logistics, finance, legal agreements. Especially I think is well-suited for smart contracts between devices under the IBM IoT platform, and using Watson AI for predicting future scenarios. In this case, an end-to-end powerful platform can be created from sensor data to business insight.

Incentivized

In our case to have a such a poweful middleware in the cloud, give us a lot of benefits such as maintenance and support. In the integration part to be able to connect SAP and Non SAP applications makes SAP Integration Suite a good investment when our master data in this case is in S4HANA. Less appropriate is that sometimes the updates in production tenant failed and they have to downgrade or repair the issues. Affecting the usage of the tool. I guess SAP team have to be more aware of performing the changes and tested well on development environments and then when they know for sure that is the correct way to go with the update put it in production.

Incentivized

• Immutability - Transactions once made are there forever.
• Distributed ledger - Allows customers to maintain their own copy of ledger by joining their node onto a blockchain network.
• Security - Help secure sensitive data, users and devices can be authenticated using the public and private keys.
• Provenance - Transactional history. Allows seamless dispute resolution.

Incentivized

• Enhanced API management features that allow now the integration with a multitude of data feeds and rating agencies
• Immediate evaluation of potential issues and configurable thresholds and automatic notifications.
• The application will monitor all aspects of compliance and update them automatically for several jurisdictions at time

• Sometimes when I try to instantiate a chain code, it won't let me and the error messages aren't clear so I can't work on a solution
• When a peer is not working, it's hard to know why just from the console

Incentivized

• Provide more pre-built integrations to use within SuccessFactors or other modules instead of everything having to be custom built
• Support is unable to provide advice on custom builds so you often have to engage a 3rd party partner
• Works best when you have the functional and technical teams working together. Otherwise, the system is too technical for a functional user to create integration and a technical user not always understand the functional perspective

Incentivized

It is in place, our system integrators are familiar with it, and it fits into the ecosystem. A better user interface, flow build and debugging experience would see it grow, many technical staff do not enjoy using it for this reason, however it is quite capable and powerful behind this one shortcoming.

Incentivized

The user interface is messy and not intuitive. It has a steep learning curve, and flows developed around are easy to make a mess with layout and can be difficult to follow. The debugging is also quite difficult, it takes some time to figure out how to follow the flow and examine data. Error handling is also difficult and not intuitive, it is better to let some errors leak and monitor through ALM.

Incentivized

In many cases I do not have to reach out to support because the knowledge base is very detailed, presenting the solutions step by step in a very detailed and intuitive way. At other times the first-level support does not have the necessary knowledge and you must wait for technical support. This is common in any provider but I would love to receive immediate, qualified support through the chat

Incentivized

Support is hard to reach and takes a long time to get a response.

Incentivized

Work with an SAP implementation partner, if possible.

Incentivized

The IBM blockchain platform is very comprehensive for hyperledger fabric and we find it easy to ramp-up our development on the blockchain side. For application service development, we moved to AWS Lambda for its established market position in the domain. Briefly, we did look at Microsoft and Amazon's offerings in blockchain platforms, however, we felt that IBM has a much stronger ecosystem around Hyperledger Fabric and that was indeed helpful at different stages as we progressed on the development.

Incentivized

SAP Integration Suite was already part of our SAP stack, part of Business Technology Platform, with out-of-the-box integration with S/4 HANA transactional and ERP system that we are using as our main back-end. Thus, we are achieving significant Total Cost Optimization benefits or running both solutions on the same platform, hosted on Azure cloud.

Incentivized

• We worked with AST (American Stock Transfer) to record their votes. It was our first product to run in production, which gave us really a big ROI after we started our project.
• We also started working with PipelineDL and tracking their assets, which made a big impact on supply chain industries.

Incentivized

• In the long run will enable us to undeploy our on premise solution
• As long as integration suite doesn't support all capabilities PO has complete migration is hard
• Will probably be cheaper than our on premise solution when we are completely migrated

Incentivized