TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo)
Likelihood to Recommend
Fiorano Software
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.
In BusinessWorks it is quite easy to develop applications and monitor where as it is not similar with Scribe. The data which successfully processed in Scribe is quite difficult to view. I think the Scribe console tool should have better view for the data it has processed.At times we founds some of our sales orders are missing which are unable to update/insert in the DB, after investigation found the issue is in Scribe tool. A case has been raised 02129657 for the same and as per the guidelines from the Scribe support engineer we did changes in the shutdown interval to zero. ''update SCRIBEINTERNAL.SCRIBE.KSYNC set keyvalue= 0 where KEYNAME = 'SETTINGS.SHUTDOWNINTERVAL''. Later this change we started getting alert emails like ''Fatal error 325 occurred: Message processor shutting down - defined maximum memory usage (900MB) exceeded. Please contact Scribe support at support@scribesoft.com if this problem persists''. We found this issue is a critical one as the occurrences of it is decreased but still it is persist.
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 It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date.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.
The UI is easy to navigate and map flows are intuitive and easy to build upon after some basic training. However, a user should have some basic knowledge of writing nested statements.
Very responsive customer support.
The debug feature is a great tool for troubleshooting. You can easily identify where the issue is in your flow. At each debug step, it returns the expected value, and when there isn't the expected value, you know when to modify your flow.
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.
Missing functionality: We like to run all the files available in the FTP when clicking the run button. Right now, we have to click the run button several times (or have multiple solutions) in order to run files from our FTP site one at a time.
Generating column fields every time a file changes from the source in the FTP is very tedious. Working in integrations makes me have to go back and forth a lot of the time, and doing this is incredibly annoying.
The security is horrendous. We installed an on-premise agent on the customer side, but we don't want them even touching the ETL tool at all. The only knowledge we are fine with knowing and being able to see is that they installed the agent, not the solutions themselves.
Our company's connector would have to point to the dataset name rather than dataset ID. It was very frustrating because we change the dataset name a lot, and then we'd have to repoint it.
It's very difficult to monitor the different integrations that go on because there isn't a consolidated dashboard.
We are deeply entrenched in using Tibco Scribe capabilities, and we are only expanding our usage. It would be one thing if we used it only for a one-time data load, but we have several Scribe maps running constantly, keeping business-critical data up to date. And the ease of use for the occasional, mass data update or upload is simply icing on the cake. I'm a big Microsoft fan, so there is potential down the road to convert our Scribe data integrations to Microsoft Flow (or Power Automate as it is now called). But for now, the functionality just isn't there with Flow (Power Automate), plus the work involved to change all our current integrations would be a large undertaking. So for now and the foreseeable future, Scribe will remain our data integration tool of choice.
As mentioned in the previous sections, setup and maintenance is extremely easy. We don't have many issues for which we need support and there is no need for deep technical skills to use Tibco Cloud Integration platform. The solution provides everything we need for our specific use case, being the replication of our Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM data to our on premise database for reporting.
We have not had any issues with TIBCO not being available when needed. I have only had to contact support less than 5 times in about 5 year time frame due to syncing issues or a problem with the agent. Support is very quick to respond as well as very helpful.
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)'s performance of the user interface are not to be complained about. The user interface is swift and is a pleasant user experience. The replication jobs take some time to finish but that is because the number of records to be updated/created on a daily basis is quite big. I did split up the jobs between highrunners (entities with a lot of changes) I update on a daily basis and quite stable entities that I update weekly. That solved my issue of a way to long replication.
For creating new process, you have lots of palettes to do every develop you need. For created process it is easy to understand even if you have ever seen before it. You can analyze your process in all their detail. User Experience is positive for beginner and expertise people. Just debug mode is still raw, but better in TIBCO BusinessWorks 6.x than TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.x .
Before using TIBCO Businessworks, I participated an official training with a specialized instructor. In this training, I learned what I needed to know to build some applications or web services and how to manage its. It was been very important to me. I understood many technical stuff to familiarize with this powerful platform. I can advice TIBCO Educational Services.
If we don't design the process correctly, it can do lot of damage (like deleting files or data etc.,) and might assume product issue rather than a design flaw. So it is always recommended to do thorough unit testing , QA and a design review even for a small process to avoid major problems.
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.
Used TIBCO for migration of our data for our learning management system.TIBCO, succesful Content ,data migration(courses, classes, registrations, transcripts etc.) ,User migration(Internal users and Partner migration)and Report migrationIntegrations with different applications Workday,Single Sign-On,CertTracker,Okta,Partner contact sync and Questionmark is succesful.LOD: Learn on demand is a third party vendor application where all Virtual classes are delivered by the vendor application. Learning management system sends the class and registration events to learn on demand via real time web service call through TIBCO
We could easily add multiple agents and new systems. This had no impact on the performance. We had some issues because flows cannot be splitted and called by each other. So you have lots of flows which are the same. It would be great if this was improved. Also transferring values via variables between flows seems to be impossible. You can only use global lists with dictionaries.
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.
