Re: "Does Crossflo have any competition, big names, small names, any names???"

Given the Crossflow product/service description below, I'd be confident in saying that almost every major computer hardware/software/service company offers some products in this arena. The questions are: How competitive are the compitition's products, and how "safe, happy, and loyal" do the big customers of the competition feel when it comes to making a new large investment in computer software.

Crossflo's flagship software product, the Crossflo DataExchange� (CDX) solution, is commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) middleware specifically designed for interagency and cross-domain data sharing. Standards-based architecture and intuitive interface design enable end users to strengthen control, selectively share information and rapidly connect disparate data sources across multiple platforms. Crossflo solutions are backed by operationally oriented professional services and expertise in HL7, NIEM, GJXDM, and IEPD deployments. - http://patriotscientific.com/index.p...

Note that Crossflow's flagship product is based on an off-the-shelf program development application - COTS, which may or may not be of concern to end users. See an evaluation of COTS below.

"Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software tends to be cheap, reliable, and functionally powerful due to its large user base. It has thus become highly desirable to incorporate COTS software into software products (systems) as it can significantly reduce development cost and effort, while maintaining overall software product quality and increasing product acceptance. However, incorporating COTS software into software products introduces new complexities that developers are currently ill-equipped to handle. Most significantly, while COTS software frequently contains programmatic interfaces that allow other software components to obtain services from them on a direct call basis, they usually lack the ability to initiate interactions with other components. This often leads to problems of state and/or data inconsistency." http://sunset.usc.edu/~aegyed/resear...