CLEO Integration Cloud is well suited in any environment where you need to move and translate business data from one format to another or multiple other formats. It is very well suited to replace existing EDI systems that are cumbersome, are a lot of work to add new mappings (add customers for example), or where the support is lousy and you are constantly creating support tickets to try to resolve issues. It just works very well and is constantly improving including keeping up to changes made by various services such as Shopify.
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.
A great platform perfectly integrated with the rest of the company's software.
Detailed design with simple and easy access from anywhere to our information.
Multi-location and multi-device access.
We save on hardware, software and maintenance, by minimizing the user's need for powerful equipment and the programs in charge of managing and configuring them, reducing the investment in their acquisition.
Cleo integration is in charge of technical maintenance and updates.
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.
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.
Before choosing a solution, we did a detailed analysis of cost, performance, scaling and support. Cleo checked all the right boxes and we have been very satisfied with our choice.
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.
We have easily improved our EDI tenfold (or more) as far as ease of adding new customers for example
We have saved a ton of money by reducing chargebacks for missing ASNs for example
We have improved customer scorecards where they measure our EDI performance such as one large brand name customer we sell wholesale to who originally scored us around 28% and after implementing CLEO we quickly went to a 96%+ score.
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.
