Fiorano ESB vs. SAP NetWeaver BPM

Fiorano would be a good choice for small-medium businesses that need integration capabilities with clients but don't want to carry the burden of an in-house development team. The software can be used by technical non-developers and the organization offers professional services to get you off the ground. For larger organizations that have an in-house development team and a wealth of internal resources, other "enterprise grade" middleware/ESB solutions may be more applicable.

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It is well suited when we need to integrate business processes with SAP ERP and SAP CRM - the solution can be integrated with business rules/procedures defined in SAP ERP/CRM and NetWeaver can be used to monitor the rules and flag off exceptions. When there are multiple workflows running, it tends to slow down running of these processes. Also, it entirely depends on SAP portal for it to run efficiently.

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• Fioranio's underlying design is very good. In the event of a sudden shutdown, it would - in theory - be able to recover messages that were in-flight.
• The visual design surface is very appealing and provides a very quick and easy way to decipher data flows. It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date. With Fiorano, the flow is already visualized in a relatively easy to understand way.
• One thing that Fiorano had over some competitors was connections into our AS400 data queues. Not all middleware solutions have that - which is a boon for organizations that still run an iSeries in the back-end.
• The support people are generally very well educated and easy to get a hold of if you have a support agreement in place.

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• Virtual paper trail. Iterations of process and current documentation are all stored as "artifacts", leaving a great trail.
• Configuration of users. BPM somewhat magically determines which users will be impacted and automates rules.
• A pro (that is also a con) is the design interface. If you know what you are doing, it is incredibly powerful and malleable.

• Fiorano scalability was a problem for us - specifically we were told about a limit of the number of components that could be run on a single server. This was not explained during the pre-sales and is a serious limitation of the platform.
• Some of the components in Fiorano are just poorly implemented. For instance, we used the FTP component to download a large multi-GB file. Apparently, that component requires equal RAM to file size. So, if you download a 10GB file, you'll need at least 10GB of RAM to do so.
• Stability was also problematic for us - some of the components or entire data flows would suddenly stop for no reason. At time they coudln't even be restarted and we were forced to restart the Fiorano service. Not an ideal situation to be in for mission critical data flows.
• Consistency is a problem for the components in Fiorano. There are wide ranges of design variations in the UI between components. Even in the same component, it could be the case that you'd have to switch back to the "old" component UI to view certain important settings. This made development more difficult.
• 3rd party support doesn't exist - perhaps it isn't popular enough? There isn't a community supporting Fiorano which means that problems require you to go to a support person.

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• Live readings would be nice.
• Easier to maneuver
• Work with all systems with the press of one keystroke

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As a big fan of SAP in general, the BPM solution fits right in with all the other things SAP does well, and does it with incredible efficiency

We have our own tech support for systems, I would say they probably could use more training on it, I don't really think it's anything regarding the SAP system, but more the knowledge they have on the system itself. It seems to take longer for them to fix any issues we may come across.

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We are evaluating options such as Apache Nifi as a possible replacement for our Fiorano data flows. We've also used PilotFish technologies that has been able to fit the same use cases as Fiorano (minus the visual component). Generally the products mentioned above excelled in areas of stability and through-put compared to Fiorano, but none have been able to consolidate our ESB components into a single platform.

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I found the initial setup of NetWeaver is much simpler than other products especially in an SAP environment where we have SAP ERP/HRM/CRM as it can be well integrated with other SAP products. The only drawback is the need/dependency on SAP Portal. It is better suited in an environment where SAP ERP is running.

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• Fiorano added another piece of complexity to our ESB solution but has not pulled its weight as far as ROI. As we started ramping up on the product, it continued to show it's short-comings and we are working now to ramp it down. Overall, it has not been a positive experience.

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• Helped us harness integrated benefit from having SAP ERP/CRM by leveraging NetWeaver to define business processes/rules and monitor exceptions
• Did not have any negative experience except for the fact that at times when multiple rules run, it can be somewhat slow

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