Reply To: Anyone using multiple integration engines?

So far I’m aware of BizTalk and Iguana being used here in addition to Cloverleaf.

TIBCO has been discussed from time to time but did not seem to offer anything we didn’t already have and likewise with NeoTools and whatever Dave Shaffer is calling his prodcut nowdays (I’m thinking it is now called CorePoint).

We continue to come back to the idea much of what competes with Cloverleaf might do the same thing so why would we buy something we already have.

If Cloverleaf was hard for us to use or not robust then looking for another product might make sense but it has done a good job for us.

It is the other people outside the integration team that seem to bring this up for discussion.

BizTalk was shoved down our throats dispite our warnings and finally was reduced in scope usage because it is designed to be used more for web services.

Stay away from BizTalk especially for HL7 persistant real-time interfaces.

Iguana has been here as a bridge gap, which is to give application owners a way to create a HL7 sender/listener that can communicate with cloverleaf and their database.

If you try Iguana, insist on getting a more current version that is cluster aware.

The older version of Iguana isn’t cluster aware and whenever one interface craps out when a database moves to another cluster it hangs all the Iguana interfaces that are grouped together in a dashboard instance which is like a cloverleaf site.

The newer cluster aware version isn’t suppose to do that but time will tell.

Iguana does NOT queue messages and handles a single message to completion before accepting ownership of the next message, so when it hangs and has to be rebooted there is no message recovery issues because they will be queued on Cloverleaf or the foreign system interface sender.

Not an especially likeable design but good since the cluster aware problem is much too frequent with such a wide spread impact in the older version that most of our interfaces are running on.

We have used Iguana to augment Cloverleaf for doing ODBC interfaces before we got the ODBC module for Cloverleaf.

The original motivation for Iguana was to give application owners a way to create a HL7 sender/listener when they wouldn’t have that capability otherwise.

If this is deemed not appropriate for discusion in clovertech, the clovertech admin can delete this without concern to hurting my feeling since it does talk about potentially competing products.