Thank you so much to everybody for their feedback.

s4Scott, thanks for pointing out the SDLC Component CI coming up in Tokyo.  We'll be on San Diego for a while, so I can't really check it out in the application (heck, I can't even find it on the list of CMDB tables in Tokyo), so I'm going off of a brief description in this SPM/APM article.  A couple of paragraphs there read similarly to the description of Service CI, that is making the component part of an application, whereas in our approach an HL7 interface as a CI is related somewhat equally to the two endpoints it connects (the main difference being the direction of the data exchange).  But a subsequent paragraph says "The advantage of the By SDLC Component view is that you can directly view all the application services and business applications that are related to an SDLC component," which seems to imply that it can link applications unrelated to one another except for the exchange of data (in the case of HL7 or API interfaces).  I guess it would be the "infrastructure" type of the SDLC Component that could function in this fashion?

Also, can you share how much work went into the creation of the custom CI and goes into its maintenance across upgrades?  The recommendations we've received so far advise being very careful with regards to custom CIs or simply discourage it from the maintenance point of view).