Fiorano - Mixed feelings...
Rating: 2 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Fiorano is being used as a single component of our overall Enterprise Service Bus. So while IT supports, maintains, and develops on it, the data going through it is used by the whole organization. The original intent for the Fiorano product was to consolidate our ESB from a suite of applications to a single platform... the purpose of this goal is to reduce development time for unique data flows, and improve stability of our data transformation and delivery engines which would ultimately lead to improved agility and decreased time-to-market for the organization.
Pros
- 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 It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date.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.
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.