Cleo Clarify vs Microsoft BizTalk

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.

BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.

• 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.

• It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
• Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
• If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
• Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
• Helps in load balancing.

• 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.

• Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations
• Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code
• Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations

BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.

I gave a 7 because this product BizTalk does need time and training to get familiar with the usability and features, it is not that easy to use.

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.

Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.

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.

BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.

• 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.

• A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.