IBM Sterling B2B Admin/Sr. Infrastructure Engineer - T.RowePrice - Owing Mills, MD
(2020-03)
TRowe Price Group (TRP) is an American publicly owned global investment management firm that offers funds, advisory services, account management, retirement plans and services for individuals, institutions, and financial intermediaries.
- Serve as the single point of entry and exit for all enterprise data transmissions, designing and supporting secure, high-availability Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions across the organization.
- Support and administer of IBM Sterling B2Bi and other MFT stack, including: Sterling B2B Integrator 6.2.0.2, Sterling Secure Proxy (SSP) 6.1.0.2, Sterling External Authentication Server (SEAS) 6.1.0.4, Sterling Control Center (SCC) 6.4.0
- Engage directly with internal teams and business users to gather requirements for new MFT connections, translating business needs into secure, scalable technical solutions.
- Lead end-to-end trading partners using Sterling File Gateway (SFG), supporting protocols such as SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, AWS S3, and Connect: Direct.
- Manage partner profiles, channels, routing templates, certificates, and trading partner configurations within SFG to support inbound and outbound file flows.
- Design and develop custom Sterling Business Processes to handle complex transmission scenarios, including Push and Pull-based transfers
- Configure and maintain SFTP/SSH profiles, including cipher, MAC, and key exchange tuning to comply with enterprise security standards.
- Perform PKI key and certificate management (Entrust & Venafi) including SSL/TLS certificate check-in, rotation, and PGP-based file-level encryption for secure data exchange.
- Troubleshoot and resolve network, firewall, and host connectivity issues across SI, ERP hosts, and external partners, including SFTP and Connect: Direct workflows.
- Optimize SFG application performance, tuning queue threads and process allocations to handle peak volume transfer loads efficiently.
- Configure AWS S3 integrations in Sterling File Gateway, managing bucket configurations, access keys, secret keys, and folder mappings.
- Support Sterling Secure Proxy (SSP) administrative functions, including starting/stopping Perimeter Servers and adapters via SSP Configuration Manager (SSPCM) during production incidents.
- Support SEAS administration, troubleshooting LDAP/Active Directory authentication issues affecting external users.
- Participate in Linux OS and Oracle DB patching activities, coordinating controlled application shutdown/startup with post-patch validation.
- Configure proactive monitoring and alerting in Sterling Control Center (SCC) using rules and action profiles to detect and respond to connectivity or transmission failures.
- Work closely with IBM Sterling Support on critical PMRs related to application failures, file transmission issues, and database incidents.
- Provide Go-Live and post-Go-Live support, including knowledge transfer sessions and operational handover to support teams.
- Deliver 24x7 on-call MFT production support, resolving high-priority incidents within SLA using ServiceNow.
- Proactively review system logs and metrics to identify potential risks and implement preventive measures to avoid business impact.
- Maintain project governance responsibilities including, vendor coordination, business continuity planning, cost estimation, and resource planning.
IBM Sterling B2B Admin/MFT Support Engineer - Blue Cross Blue Shield RI - Providence, Rhode Island
(2016-06 - 2019-12)
BCBSRI is the Rhode Island's largest, locally based not-for-profit health plan and a leading provider of healthcare coverage and wellness information to Rhode Island. Project at this firm is to support their upgraded managed file transfer (MFT) tool Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) 4.3 to IBM Sterling Integrator (SI) 5.2.4 operating on Red Hat Linux environment including Sterling File Gateway (SFG) and its components such as Sterling Secure Proxy (SSP), Sterling External Authentication Server (SEAS), Sterling Control Center (SCC)
- Current responsibilities include extensive user interaction, understanding requirements and expectations, maintaining P&L, budgets, provide technical solutions, resource, and cost estimations. Managing SLA's & Business Continuity Plan with Vendor management was critical functionality.
- Work on installation, configuration, day today maintenance, data backup and restoration, clustering, troubleshooting and system maintenance
- Involved in new customer Sterling File Gateway (SFG) implementations, architecting, and developing business processes, support with system architecture, create processes and implement use of advanced communications like SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, AS2 & Connect: Direct
- Develop business process to SFTP Get/Put files with different Partners using graphical process modeler and BPML Code. Created code list to get FTP/SFTP files from different partners using Sterling Integrator
- Performed PKI key and certificate exchange for secure SSH and SSL data transmissions. Used PGP/GPG for file level encryption.
- Used Sterling External Authentication Server (SEAS) for the validation of a trading partner User ID and Password against the Sterling B2B Integrator user store.
- Worked with Account Provisioning/Active Directory teams for any password reset, updating user account information inside LDAP profile.
- Worked on Sterling Secure Proxy (SSP) to protect file transfer data of the trading partner from private and public internet
- Experience in setting up the perimeter server and routing the file transmissions traffic to different locations inside production/disaster recovery environments during server outages.
- Configured altering rules in Sterling Control Center (SCC) for any connectivity issues interrupting file transmissions to external and internal vendors
- SI Performance tuning by analyzing system queues and distribute loads on Queues based on priority, business function, response times required, dependence of process on other sub-processes
- Work closely with IBM Sterling Support on critical PMRs related to application failures, file transmission issues, and database incidents.
- Provide Go-Live and post-Go-Live support, including knowledge transfer sessions and operational handover to support teams.
- Deliver 24x7 on-call MFT production support, resolving high-priority incidents within SLA using ServiceNow.
- Proactively review system logs and metrics to identify potential risks and implement preventive measures to avoid business impact.
- Maintain project governance responsibilities including, vendor coordination, business continuity planning, cost estimation, and resource planning.
- Extensive knowledge of logs files, properties files and working with codelists resource management and keys.
- Worked with Network and Firewall teams on opening Ports/IP's related to vendor host details from authenticating them into the file gateway portal for transmitting files
- Tested new protocol setup with network team that can do active as well as passive FTP transmissions by changing the BIG IP/F5 configurations.
- Created/Renewed Connect: Direct certificates using CD Secure + Admin tool both in Windows and Unix environments related to external and internal user's authentication
- Worked on documenting requirements for Connect: Direct server migration to include migration of initparm file, user file and net-map configuration
- Restarting the Connect: Direct servers based on the alert notification specified to node during production outages
- Solved multiple Connect: Direct production issues based on the alert notification and incidents raised by the user's on Snode and Pnode authentication issue which involved in checking the logs from CD requester (Node Properties, User Proxies, Statistics details)
- Addressed day to day issues in production, development, and disaster recovery (DR) environments
- Oversee QA rollouts to production and ensure they are made in accordance with lifecycle methodology
- Worked on resolving production issues, schedule change request, service catalog and on call rotations through ServiceNow
- Handled tickets based on the priority and informed the issues to the customer within stipulated SLA's and finding root cause of the problem.
EDI/Sterling B2B Consultant - EC Infosystems (ECI) - Uniondale, NY
(2015-11 - 2016-04)
EC Infosystems (ECI) formed in 1995 and based in New York, provides hosted Billing and EDI Solution to Energy Markets in the Deregulated Energy Industry. This project involved migrating from EDIPORT system to Sterling Integrator 5.2 environment.
- Collaborate with vendors, trading partners and internal function teams to define EDI requirements.
- Created Application and Implementation Guides for all transactions and trading partners
- Involved in map development, testing and implementation for EDI transactions such as 810,820,824,832,850,855,856,860,864,997& 999
- Developed & Modified Mapping Specification for EDI X12 Transaction set 850(Purchase Order) and 810 (Invoice)
- Upgraded EDI data sets from 4010 to 5010 for several trading partners which involved comparing specifications between both versions
- Converted XSLT maps to XML inbound files to X12 standard files.
- Developed/modified maps from AI 6.0 system to Sterling Integrator to create a map in SI by looking into AI maps
- Reverse engineering existing customizations such as look up tables, extended rules, and code lists
- Used different communication protocols such as FTP, SFTP, AS2 and VAN for transferring files to customer for data verification
- Maintained EDI profiles and daily EDI data flow in Sterling Integrator (SI) Environment using Sterling VAN and AS2 communications.
- Used Sterling File Gateway (SFG) to monitor the daily transmissions of the files from source to the destination and created trading partner set up profiles in it.
- Responsible in setting up Trading Partner Identities, Document exchange, Packaging and Envelopes for both inbound and outbound partners in IBM Quick Start Service (QSS) environment.
- Setting up the business process schedules to automate the translation and transmission of file from different source through FTP protocol.
- Remap all maps to run under Sterling Integrator; in the process, change the maps from EDI/to/from Flat File and EDI to/from SQL database.
- Involved in creation of database objects like tables, views, stores procedures, indexes, and collections
- Moving Test files, Maps, App files in UNIX from Dev to QA and QA to Prod Server
- Interfacing and providing escalation production support for customers both internal & external at various stages of new solutions on-boarding and while providing escalated production support.
