A lot of the companies who come to us for their managed file transfer (MFT) needs aren't first time MFT customers. Many of them have already acquired a solution from another vendor but then realized some of their newer requirements were no longer being met.
Because migrating to another solution can be very time-consuming and expensive, it's important to know beforehand the capabilities of each prospective vendor and take into consideration even those capabilities you don't currently need (yet) before finalizing a deal.
To clarify, you don't have to always choose the one with the most features. Some features can be utterly useless and will never be brought into play in a production environment. So, how do you determine which features will come in handy later on?
You can start by studying trends in your industry as well as related industries and combine the information you get with what you know about your current business' and trading partners' needs. Identify which trends are most likely to impact your business in the not-so-distant future and prioritize the requirements that might come off of those. While you won't be able to totally predict the future, it would help to approximate what it would look like.
We've got something that might help
You know your business more than we do, so you should be in a better position to determine which features should be your top priority. However, because we've been dealing with so many customers from a wide range of industries for about two decades now, we know a thing or two about what most of them need in as far as MFT solutions are concerned.
To help businesses who are scouting for an MFT solution, we've put together a worksheet containing the most popular features as well as features that most large enterprises have been looking for. You can use that worksheet to compare the solutions of prospective vendors to see which one has the best match for your organization.
You can download the worksheet from here: