Product Review, Sterling Gentran

Summary

Sterling commerce is one of the biggest names in the EDI business, and it’s Gentran line of integration products is well known and well respected. In this review we decided to take a look at Gentran for windows systems in our comparison to Inovis, EMANIO and Softshare. Like the products from Inovis, Sterling’s product is from the very start a product that is obviously designed to provide a rich feature set, a very good performance platform but at a price point that most small and mid-sized businesses will find very difficult to justify. It’s no secret that Inovis and Sterling Commerce are the two main companies that do battle for the Enterprise level EDI and supply chain management market. Their products reflect this in their complexity and price.

Strengths

Sterling Gentran was relatively straight forward to set up and with a little bit of guidance from the manual got us ready to start mapping in a relatively short amount of time. Just like with the Inovis product, however, working with the mapping system was a little more challenging. While the capabilities of the product are rich and the feature set robust, it’s obvious that Sterling pays little attention to the pure EDI integration side of its business and has moved on to bigger fish (i.e. supply chain management) What this means is that while the product has a lot of features it suffers in terms of performance and ease of use.

Limitations

Sterling Gentran is difficult to use, expensive and definitively seems to suffer from a bit of abandonment. While getting the system up and running was relatively easy, once we started building maps we realized quickly that the process would be complex and require the support of the company to get us started. This is where problems really began because classes from the company can be pricey, getting your sales rep to pay attention to your “little” company can often be challenging and waiting for someone to get back to you with an answer can prove frustrating and time consuming. Eventually we got our test system running and sending our EDI data back and forth between our sample system and our sample vendor. Getting from step a to step z, however, was a long and often frustrating proposition

Wish List

Our wish list here is simply that the company once again start paying attention to the lower end of the product offering for in-house EDI and not just try to push everyone onto either the enterprise software or the web-based system they rent.

Product Ratings

The product ratings below reflect our evaluation of Sterling Gentran with a rating score that ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 equaling “fail” and 5 being an “Excellent”. Our overall score for Inovis TLW is of 2.86 out of a total possible of 5.

Our Team