Cleo Clarify vs. InterSystems Ensemble (legacy product) vs. SPS Commerce

CLEO Clarify is best suited in an environment where EDI is a main source of business to business electronic communications (EDI). It also is very well suited to take data from multiple sources and convert it from any to any format to fit your requirements. CLEO Clarify may be more well suited to companies that have capable IT team members such as an EDI specialist or technical people.

Incentivized

• Best suited for fast development with a fundamental emphasis on object orientation
• Prohibitive costs for very small integration projects

When you find yourself growing and finding success faster than you can keep up with, SPS Commerce will save your life and your reputation. The services they offer are easy to understand, they are available with suggestions and ideas for better ways, personalization is available to best suit your needs or the needs of your customers so that you can really shine and relieve the worries that come with growing pains. SPS also helps to keep information accurate with less human touching to cause errors.

Incentivized

• API connectors to get and to send data to many different end points.
• Ability to convert to and from multiple formats of data.
• Excellent customer support to help us complete any project.

Incentivized

• Easy to use: The simplicity of its programming language allows fast learning. Visual environment to generate complex code.
• Robust: A fall of the system will not be a problem. Never again will information of the transactions in progress be lost. Never more messages lost.
• Connect to the world: The most popular connection is possible to implement quickly. FTP, File folder, TCP, SMPT, REST.... all method are ready to use. Only define "where" and "how"

Incentivized

• We can easily create and send order confirmations.
• We respond to the corresponding receiving departments with timely and accurate ASN's.
• Once the order has shipped, customer service utilizes the invoicing function.

Incentivized

• We really have not run into any issues.
• When we do require additional functionality, CLEO devs have either implemented it or have stepped us through how to resolve [our] needs.

Incentivized

• Given that Ensemble and Cache are one of if not the only true fully object orientated database/development technologies for massive transactional data systems its customizability is extensive and it just comes down to the creativity of the developer to get the products to pretty much do whatever they want to do with it. However, this is not necessarily obvious to newcomers to the technology.
• The developer community could do with greater participation from the software developers/application specialists and engineers within InterSystems.
• More extensive documentation and greater access to proven working solutions particularly in the realm of some of the lesser known or new and upcoming technologies.

• We have quite a few people here who use this portal, and we have it set up to receive an email when an order is available to print. As of now, you can only add a few recipients to receive those emails; it limits you.
• Invoicing is challenging at times as you have to remember to go in and invoice. If you forgot, it is hard to find the order to invoice, as it seems to disappear.
• We still haven't figured out how to have some of the invoicing features auto-populate, so there isn't so much to fill out. I wish some of those features were easier to use, or find if you have them.

Incentivized

If I can drop it, I will this year. We gave it a decent try for over 4 years and it has gotten worse with each added connection.

I have yet to raise an issue with InterSystems WRC that they have been unable to resolve to my satisfaction in the 20+ years that I have worked with their products.

Phone support is generally very good and you can get a person on the phone within a few minutes. Their emailed customer support however is very poor and often goes several days or longer before receiving a response, if ever at all

Incentivized

Cost wise the products may be similar but on the basis of ease of implementation and use, for us CLEO Clarify won that battle even though we hired an EDI specialist who had worked for years with Seeburger BIS. This was very telling for us as he we very well versed in Seeburger and could easily had recommended them, but instead did a thorough analysis and decided upon CLEO for our solution.

Incentivized

Mirth is another integration platform that we have used but its development, in Java, made us always create new methods every time a new product was integrated. Every connection process had to be developed from the beginning and it was not easy to reuse code. Nor did it allow us to have an extensive catalog of HL7 messaging, having to perform the validation of each and every one of its fields manually.

Incentivized

In my opinion, SPS Commerce is the bottom out of all three provided here. I think, essentially, if you are looking to be hands off and only oboard on setup and don't plan on growing your business and want to not understand anything about EDI and how it affects your company, SPS Commerce is a fine choice. Just if you want to do anything beyond that, I believe you are going to have the worst time.

• CLEO Clarify has helped us take our compliance rating with our biggest customers from around 25% with our ERP integrated solution, up to 98% just by switching to CLEO and being able to onboard new customers effectively within one week where it used to take 30 to 45 days and have multiple errors.
• We are able to continue to find applications that CLEO is perfectly suited for including eComm and BI data collection.

Incentivized

• We have integrated 5 laboratories in a treatment monitoring system in less than a month of development. Being able to integrate the following in a period no longer than a week.

Incentivized

• I enrolled in a product I ended up not using because the vendor that required it ended our working relationship and SPS refused to offer a refund. After I canceled it, they continued to charge our account for three more months of service.
• The interface is simple and easy to understand and use, so it saved time when preparing shipments.

Incentivized