The Wealth Management Network from Fiserv is an expansive networks of managed account data and connectivity. It brings together asset managers and sponsors to perform all necessary business functions to support the industry. The Network includes messaging services, information exchange, and managed account data services.
They offer almost every single thing a financial institution would need for their core business allows you to save quite a bit of money by bundling everything together. Fiserv has greatly increased the speed in which they roll out new banking product. From a banking software platform, they are the best in the business.
It is perfectly suited if some heavy operation needs to be automated where jobs can be queued up. Scalable app which is required to develop in a lesser time frame. Good for when users should be able to change rules more frequently without any downtime, like promotions. The server is well proven in the market. BizTalk server is the best fit if all other integration adapters are developed using Microsoft applications and if all applications are meant to be processed on a Windows environment.
BizTalk uses Microsoft Visual Studio as the IDE (integrated development environment) tool, and it's very easy to use.
The orchestration engine of BizTalk addresses resource issue very well for long-running business processes by dehydrating and rehydrating orchestration instances.
BizTalk is very easy to integrate if the development is mainly on the Microsoft software family.
Cost ... it's definitely not the cheapest option out there. the way pricing is itemized and a separate upcharge for each add-on gets annoying. They can probably bundle things a little better and offer a discount on the bundled products
the volume of system updates and changes is nauseating at times and we have to prepare and test accordingly every time there is a scheduled update. that takes up a lot of resources; quarterly updates to products would be much easier.
more responsive support and ideally more stable support engineers ... it seems like turnover is high in their support roles and that impacts customer success and MTTR.
BizTalk needs to be better at tracking down errors after the fact. Input files by default get deleted after processing successfully, unless you specifically specify that they don't. This can be an issue where you need to see what the input file contained, since you may have errors showing up in your target platform, in our case this was SAP.
BizTalk logging needs improved. It needs to be able to log the content of the messages it sends and receives. It would be good if the log had a link to the input and output files.
BizTalk needs to allow a simple way to preserve the input and output files for debugging purposes. A master setting on the orchestration would be helpful for this.
Microsoft BizTalk is not an intuitive product. It requires many hours of looking through the settings to achieve what you need. Using 3rd party DLLs is a nightmare as you are forced to register them in the GAC of the server and this process is quite cumbersome just to use a DLL.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
I can't name any other competitors that we considered because I have signed multiple NDAs that prohibit me from doing so. I can say that the decision to go with Fiserv WMN was in large part because we have other Fiserv Products and as a result, we already have a strong established relationship with Fiserv (and First Data for that matter, before they were acquired by Fiserv)
We did look at Jitterbit dataloader from Salesforce.com. Jitterbit seems like a pretty decent solution if you are doing a lot of uploads into Salesforce.com. However, its not nearly as flexible as Microsoft Biztalk is. Biztalk allows you to create any type of custom solution you wish, whereas Jitterbit is much more limited.
Speed of service is greatly improved across partners. I believe our MTTR for service requests has improved by 30-40%
Standardized platform for our staff which translates to better retention and a lower training effort.
Cost is the negative impact ... it goes without saying that using Fiserv is much more expensive to the manual alternative which is very human resource intensive but low cost. But that's to be expected ...we're just trading time for money.
