Cleo Communications LLC, simply referred to as Cleo, is a privately held software company founded in 1976. The company is best known for its ecosystem integration platform, Cleo Integration Cloud with RADAR.

History

Cleo originally began as a division of Phone 1 Inc., a voice data gathering systems manufacturer, and built data concentrators and

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termin ...

s — multi-bus computers, modems, and terminals to interface with IBM mainframes via bisynchronous communications. The company then began developing mainframe middleware in the 1980s, and with the rise of the PC, moved into B2B data communications and secure

file transfer File transfer is the transmission of a computer file through a communication channel from one computer system to another. Typically, file transfer is mediated by a communications protocol. In the history of computing, numerous file transfer protocol ...

software. Since being acquired in 2012, the company’s offerings have evolved into Cleo Integration Cloud, a platform for enterprise business integration.

Business

Based in

Rockford, Illinois Rockford is a city in Winnebago County, Illinois, located in the far northern part of the state. Situated on the banks of the Rock River, Rockford is the county seat of Winnebago County (a small portion of the city is located in Ogle County). ...

(USA), with offices in

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, Pennsylvania, London, and Bangalore, Cleo has about 400 employees and more than 4,100 direct customers. The company's flagship offering, Cleo Integration Cloud, provides both on-premise and cloud-based integration technologies and comprises solutions for B2B/ EDI, application integration, data movement and data transformation. Previous products now incorporated into the Cleo Integration Cloud platform include Cleo Harmony, Cleo Clarify, and Cleo Jetsonic. Cleo solutions span a variety of industries, including manufacturing,

logistics Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...

and

supply chain In commerce, a supply chain is a network of facilities that procure raw materials, transform them into intermediate goods and then final products to customers through a distribution system. It refers to the network of organizations, people, acti ...

, retail,

third-party logistics Third-party logistics (abbreviated as 3PL, or TPL) in logistics and supply chain management is an organization's use of third-party businesses to outsource elements of its distribution, warehousing, and fulfillment services. Third-party logisti ...

, warehouse management and transportation management, healthcare, financial services and government. The

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a Cabinet-level executive branch department of the federal government charged with providing life-long healthcare services to eligible military veterans at the 170 VA medical centers an ...

adopted Cleo's

fax Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...

technology, Cleo Streem, in 2013 when in need of

FIPS 140-2 The Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 140-2, (FIPS PUB 140-2), is a U.S. government computer security standard used to approve cryptographic modules. The title is ''Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules''. Initial publ ...

-compliant technology to protect information, and the City of

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...

has used Cleo Streem for network and desktop faxing since 2006. Cleo also serves U.S. transportation logistics company MercuryGate International and SaaS-based food logistics organization ArrowStream. It powers the architecture for several major supply chain companies, such as Blue Yonder and

SAP Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a separa ...

. Cleo integrates the pharmaceutical supply chain for such companies as

Octapharma Octapharma AG, founded in 1983, is a family-owned pharmaceutical company, and bills itself as "one of the largest human protein manufacturers in the world, developing and producing human proteins from human plasma and human cell lines " Ther ...

. Key partners include FourKites and ClientsFirst, among many others. Cleo customers also include household brands such as

New Balance New Balance Athletics, Inc. (NB), best known as simply New Balance, is one of the world's major sports footwear and apparel manufacturers. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, the multinational corporation was founded in 1906 as the New Balance Arch ...

Barilla ''Barilla'' refers to several species of salt-tolerant (halophyte) plants that, until the 19th century, were the primary source of soda ash and hence of sodium carbonate. The word "barilla" was also used directly to refer to the soda ash obtained ...

, Duraflame,

Reddy Ice Reddy Ice Holdings, Inc. is the largest packaged ice manufacturer in the United States, serving approximately 82,000 customer locations under the Reddy Ice brand name. It was originally a division of the Southland Corporation (the parent company ...

, and

Brother Industries is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational electronics and electrical equipment company headquartered in Nagoya, Japan. Its products include Printer (computing), printers, multifunction printers, desktop computers, sewing machin ...

. Cleo has partnerships with more than 300 system integrator, reseller, and technology companies including VAI, SrinSoft, Vertext, Remedi, delaPlex, and Cognizant.

Expansion

In June 2014, Cleo opened an office in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

for members of its support and engineering teams. In 2014, the company hired Jorge Rodriguez as Senior Vice President of Product Development and John Thielens as Vice President of Technology. Cleo hired Dave Brunswick as Vice President of Solutions for North America in 2015, and Cleo hired Ken Lyons to lead global sales in 2016. Lyons now serves as the company's Chief Revenue Officer. More recent additions to the company's leadership team include Vipin Mittal, Vice President, Customer Experience, and Tushar Patel, CMO. Cleo opened its product development facility in Bengaluru, India, in 2015 and expanded its hybrid cloud integration teams into a new office there in 2017. The company also opened a London office in 2016 and expanded its network of channel partners in

EMEA EMEA is a shorthand designation meaning Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The acronym is used by institutions and governments, as well as in marketing and business when referring to this region: it is a shorthand way of referencing the two ...

. In 2016, Cleo acquired EXTOL International, a Pottsville, Pa.-based business and EDI integration and

data transformation In computing, data transformation is the process of converting data from one format or structure into another format or structure. It is a fundamental aspect of most data integrationCIO.com. Agile Comes to Data Integration. Retrieved from: http ...

company for an undisclosed amount. In 2017, the company moved its headquarters from

Loves Park, Illinois Loves Park is a city in Boone and Winnebago counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. Most of the city is in Winnebago County, with a tiny sliver in the east located in Boone County. The population was 23,996 at the 2010 census, up from 20,044 in ...

, to Rockford. In 2021 the company received a significant growth investment from H.I.G. Capital. In July 2022, Cleo opened a new, 5,000-square-foot office located in Chicago's Loop. In November 2022, Cleo launched an accelerator for

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) intelligent business applications announced by Microsoft in July 2016 and released on November 1, 2016. Feature applicat ...

SCM-to-X12 and a connector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. These pre-built solutions allow businesses and users to quickly build integration flows that integrate their

digital ecosystem A digital ecosystem is a distributed system, distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organisation, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems. Digital ecosystem models are informed by knowledge ...

s. In March 2023, Cleo released CIC PAVE (Procurement Automation and Vendor Enablement). PAVE provides customers with enhanced supply chain visibility via a supplier portal that allows the customer to keep vendor interaction in a single location, even if they cannot use EDI or have API-ready applications.

Certification

Cleo regularly submits its products to Drummond Group's interoperability software testing for

AS2 AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is a specification on how to transport structured business-to-business data securely and reliably over the Internet. Security is achieved by using digital certificates and encryption. Background AS2 was created ...

, AS3 and ebMS 2.0. In January 2020, Cleo announced that its new application connector for Acumatica ERP has been recognized as an Acumatica-Certified Application (ACA). The company also holds SOC 2, Type 2 certification.

Awards

Cleo was a

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

partner of the year award for five years, from 2009 to 2014. The Cleo Streem solution integrates with Xerox multi-function products, providing customers with solutions for network fax and interactive messaging needs. Cleo was named to Food Logistics’ FL100+ Top Software and Technology Providers Lists in 2016, 2017, 2019 an
2020
Cleo CEO, Mahesh Rajasekharan was named an

Ernst & Young Ernst & Young Global Limited, trade name EY, is a multinational professional services partnership headquartered in London, England. EY is one of the largest professional services networks in the world. Along with Deloitte, KPMG and Pricewaterh ...

Entrepreneur Of The Year 2022 Midwest Award winner. As of April 2022, Cleo has been named a Leader in EDI on the G2 Grid, a peer-to-peer review site, for 20 straight quarters.

References

{{Reflist, 3 EDI software companies Software companies based in Illinois Network management Managed file transfer File transfer protocols Data management Software companies of the United States