Cleo Clarify, formerly Extol Business Integrator, is a business-to-business middleware offering owned and supported by Cleo since its 2016 acquisition of Extol.
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Mule ESB
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Mule ESB, from Mulesoft, is an open source middleware solution.
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.
If you’re bringing anything into Salesforce you should just invest now into Mule, you will get your money’s worth and find a myriad of uses to build APIs between many other systems. Once you build a component you can easily reuse it as a building block to attach to another source/destination. This makes it easy to ramp up quickly and spread usage of Mule throughout your enterprise. A good value for medium to large companies, but probably cheaper to outsource your job to a consulting firm if you are smaller.
It is best suited for Rest API development. Mule ESB uses RAML as an API descriptor which is less complex and easy to understand. RAML is an open standard majorly supported by Mulesoft. Once RAML is developed, it is very easy (a few clicks)to create flows corresponding to the resources defined in the RAML. One can also include JSON schema validation in RAML, and with the use of APIkit router, Mule ESB makes the request validation very easy (it's automatic basically.)
Mule ESB comes with a large spectrum of community and enterprise connectors. We have connectors for all the major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, etc. This enables Mule ESB to integrate with the other systems in a faster and more robust way. Mule ESB has many components to fulfill the requirements of each integration (for example batch processing, parallel processing, choice, etc.)
Mule API gateway is one of the best tools (modules) of Mulesoft's offering. It supports API governance and management very well. One can easily enforce policies on their APIs with API gateway. It enables some of the must-have features in an API solution (i.e. throttling, oAuth, access levels, etc.)
Implementing a CI/CD (DevOps) environment for Mule ESB is a very easy task. Mule majorly uses MAVEN as its build tool, which in turn makes it best suitable for CI/CD approach. Mule also provides MAVEN plugins for auto deployments to the servers. Mule also has a best Unit testing module which is MUnit. MUnit can be used for both Unit and Functional testing, and it is easy to write and generates coverage reports in various formats.
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.
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.
