IBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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Score9.2 out of 10
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Zift Solutions Through Partner Marketing Automation Platform is a suite of applications meant to streamline interactions with channel partners, amplify demand, and ease cooperation on co-branded campaigns.
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Very helpful in Marketing Actions, Marketing Decision Support, Sales Action Support, Customer Preference Analysis, Inbound Marketing Strategy Implementation, and Sales and Marketing Tool Integration. It's a comprehensive resource for helping customers make choices. All the years we have used this tool to communicate with our trading partners, there have been zero issues.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Partner tracking and communication - Relayware allows a holistic view of a partner. Since the tool tracks everything a user does, you can easily see when the partner has sent or received emails, participated in trainings, download files, etc. You can also see how and when back-office users such as admins, partner managers, etc. have communicated with partners, updated dashboards, downloaded reports, and much more. The granularity of the history and tracking is exception for seeing how you and a partner are engaging. It's also very helpful for companies who require an audit trail for activities.
Training/eLearning/onboarding - I've worked with a number of eLearning/LMS platforms over the years and I'm stunned by the learning system built into Relayware. It's hands down far and above many existing standalone products and if Relayware was smart, they would offer this as a standalone item. The system supports the typical eLearning/LMS basics- SCORM support, grading, training by module, etc. but it also allows for custom training paths based on learning modules which can be SCORM, video, HTML, files, and any combination of these. The grading system is separated from the training content which allows for highly flexible user cases. You can created quizzes, tests, and certifications based on individual content modules or a full learning path.
Since the LMS is part of the overall Relayware system which is intended for partner management, you can create a range of onboarding processes/paths which are customized to particular types of partners. The system can support both online and offline activities so you can require xxx to be done online, followed by in-person training, etc. It really is an impressive system. I liked it so much, I decomissioned my instance of a Moodle LMS and I now use the Relayware LMS to serve as both partner eLearning and general customer eLearning through a separate portal.
Flexibility - It's hard to believe the Relayware can do so much in a single SaaS. The system allows for connection to SFDC so working leads and opportunities is simple. A manager or admin can add, edit, and remove web pages with ease. Data can be placed on any webpage using a number of "Relayware tags" which are special HTML tags to pull data from the system and use on a page. Customizable workflows for most any part of the system can be handled via a workflow engine. This could be onboarding, partner signup and registration, lead/deal/opportunity management and routing to appropriate users, Legal and Export compliance checking of documents and files, and on and on.
The only real drawback is that the system is so flexible, it helps to have good training and support so you don't get lost. Luckily this is only an issue for those who administer the system and Relayware is keen to provide good support for their product.
Licensing & cost - My observation is that Relayware has several good options for licensing and overall cost. They break the system down into several key modules so if you don't need something, you can remove it and not pay for it. However, that also makes it easy for the product to grow as your needs do. One of their license modules is by back-office users, not front-office. The benefit of this is when coupled with SFDC, you only need a single SFDC license for all of your field personnel and front end users. Since one of the Relayware models is to not charge by the number of front end users, you can save thousands in SFDC licenses. Ie: A user works through Relayware to report/edit/manage leads, deals, and opportunities. The system uses a single SFDC license to connect to SFDC so rather than every front end user needing an SFDC license, you only need one. Depending on the size of your organization, this alone could easily pay for the Relayware system.
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
At the same time that I started using ZiftONE, we worked in a test mode with the GetResponse platform. We select ZiftONE as support on platforms that require content syndication since the information it provides us is more accurate than that of GetResponse. However, GetResponse has a more intuitive sales funnel for a person who has never worked with these types of tools.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
In our personal opinion, we can say that this tool has not generated negative aspects in our work, so we can say that we are comfortable because I can keep all my potential clients organized and make sure that nothing is lost.
