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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webMethods Trading Network
Score 10.0 out of 10
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webMethods Trading Network is a B2B middleware offering from Software AG.
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.
webMethods Trading Networks is an excellent choice for a business-to-business (B2B) gateway platform, for sending and receiving messages to/from external trading partner organizations. It excels at making it easy to define new interfaces and provides robust mechanisms for ensuring successful message delivery and processing through automatic retries. We also use it successfully for all our application-to-application (A2A) integration, which many would believe is beyond the scope of what webMethods Trading Network is good for; however, we have made it work and it has been very successful in our organization. I would not recommend using webMethods Trading Network for integration that requires low-latency or high-bandwidth data transfers. It is much better suited to shipping reasonable sized XML or JSON or flat file messages (less than 100 mb) around in situations that do not need sub-second latency. If you have low-latency or high-bandwidth needs, you should use a product more focussed on eventing, such as Kafka, for example.
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.
