Extol International


EXTOL International Inc. is the largest technology firm in the city of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, employing over 90 technology professionals in the field of electronic data interchange and business-to-business data integration. It has also been named one of the top private companies in the Lehigh Valley, and one of the top 500 technology firms in the United States.
EXTOL was incorporated in 1989 by Joe Baran and Tony Baran, who at the time, recognized the need for companies throughout the supply chain to comply with EDI mandates. They created EDI integration software that ran on the IBM AS/400 platform, which today, remains one of the last IBM-based EDI integration products actively being developed and supported. In 2006, EXTOL publicly released the next generation of its EDI integration software, EXTOL Business Integrator, which allowed companies to exchange EDI through multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. EBI expanded enterprise data integration capabilities beyond traditional EDI to include other data file tips such as XML, spreadsheets, flat files, and application-to-application data.
By the start of 2012, EXTOL had grown their customer base by 750 companies and had realized record-breaking sales revenues. The continued need for EDI and B2B integration solutions across the supply chain helped EXTOL develop significant software releases, and by the end of 2015, had increased market share by 26.9%.
In 2016, EXTOL was acquired by Illinois-based Cleo, an enterprise software company that provides electronic data interchange, and application-to-application, business-to-business, and big data integration services to organizations with managed file transfer needs. The Pottsville, PA office will operate under the Cleo name.