Congratulations to the AppExchange 2010 Best of Winners

Image via CrunchBase

Salesforce.com announced the 2010 AppExchange “Best of” Award winners today. They also posted a video to celebrate their 5 year anniversary.

This year’s winners are:

• Best ChatterExchange App: FedEx Shipping with Chatter
• Best Contract Management App: EchoSign E-Signature
• Best Dashboard or Report: FunnelSource
• Best Data Cleansing Tool: CountryComplete
• Best Data Integration App: Informatica Cloud
• Best Human Resources & Recruiting App: Jobscience Recruiting
• Best Marketing Automation App: Marketo Marketing Automation
• Best Mass Email App: iContact for Salesforce
• Best Productivity Tool: Email Integration for Salesforce from iHance
• Best Quoting App: BigMachines Configurator, Quotes, Pricing & Proposals
• Best Survey App: Clicktools Surveys & Scripts

This recognition is based on quality and quantity of customer reviews during the year. Congratulations to all of the winners! (Here’s more information on each vendor and their winning app.)

And here’s the video…

Talking Cloud Integration with the DreamSimplicity Team

Okay, you put a microphone near me and clearly I’ll grab it and go. Thanks to Matt and the great team at DreamSimplicity for the interview and overall fantastic coverage of Dreamforce 2010.

Informatica’s New Pay-Per-Use Cloud Integration Platform

Speaking of Dreamforce, here are a few recaps of the “amazing” (aka the keynote keyword) event:

• Four Interesting Trends from Dreamforce (my favorite: “Integration Must be Seamless”)
• Salesforce.com Dreams Big – and Forcefully Part I
• Dreamforce 2010: A Recap of the Cloud Computing Event of the Year
• Dreamforce Social Web Coverage Dec 2010
• Was It All A (Cloud) Dream? 25 Scenes From Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2010
• May the Force Be With You; the Salesforce Dreamforce Festival
• Clinton Keynote – Using Technology To Solve World’s Problems

Follow #df10 on Twitter to keep up with the latest on the post show news and reviews…

The Importance of AppExchange to Salesforce Customer Success

I was digging around the AppExchange today and noticed that there are now “962 Apps and counting.” I suspect we’ll see an announcement soon for app #1000.

In a recent interview with an IT executive about their salesforce.com implementation, the importance of the AppExchange to Salesforce success was put this way:

“A key differentiator for us was the AppExchange. The fact that there is an ecosystem of surrounding applications that can help us deliver immediate ROI was huge. Now, if new functionality is needed, we can go out to the AppExchange and try it before we buy it. We can test it in our sandbox and see how it goes before plugging it into the production environment.  The ability to quickly deploy tools to our sales team that increase productivity has a direct connection to revenue, and it gives us the flexibility to not have to make big investments before we know they will work.”

That’s a solid endorsement! Congratulations to my friends on the AppExchange team.

I also noticed that Informatica’s free Data Loader is the most popular app of all time on the AppExchange, followed by a calendar sync app from Appirio, SalesView from InsideView, VerticalResponse, and a Force.com project management app.

Sounds like bi-directional cloud data integration is both the on-ramp to the cloud and essential to making cloud applications stick.

Cloud Integration Customer Success

Another great Informatica Cloud case study was published today.

“Informatica Cloud Services has allowed us to streamline the entire sales-enablement process, from data integration development to information delivery. Sales no longer has to access multiple systems to try to find the information they need and IT no longer has to worry about the data integration part of development work. Informatica Cloud Services provide us with a very cost-effective and powerful way to get it done, fast.”

Here’s a summary of what cloud integration has delivered:

• Integrates product and account data from a number of sources into the salesforce.com Sales Cloud
• Drives timely pricing and margin analysis by replicating latest sales data in the cloud into the company’s on-premise business intelligence environment.
• Empowers line-of-business users to manage day-to-day data integration and replication tasks, freeing IT resources for other high value work.
• Eliminates hand coding:  what used to take up to a month of custom development is now accomplished in a few hours.
• Promotes data governance and business and IT collaboration with improved information access and visibility across multiple applications and data sources.

Be sure to read the entire press release here.

The Importance of Cloud Application Integration

I’ve been posting a series of interviews with members of an IT team who have recently implemented salesforce.com. Today’s post focused on the importance of cloud application integration. A few highlights include:

On the importance of the AppExchance:

“A key differentiator for us was the AppExchange. The fact that there is an ecosystem of surrounding applications that can help us deliver immediate ROI was huge. Now, if new functionality is needed, we can go out to the AppExchange and try it before we buy it. We can test it in our sandbox and see how it goes before plugging it into the production environment.”

On the challenges of hand-coding data integration:

“Many organizations will tackle this challenge by simply doing some API coding and making database calls manually. Inevitably they get buried under hand-coded interfaces, which leads to maintenance and complexity challenges over time. It also means you have a bunch of code that can’t be leveraged in other areas.”

On Master Data Management:

“By having MDM-maintained hierarchy data in salesforce.com, a sales rep can see related opportunities and leads, what activity is going on in subsidiaries and what opportunities there might be to expand a customer’s usage of the Informatica suite.”

You can read the entire interview here.

CRM Account Synchronization in the Cloud

Based on the number of people who registered for the webinar and the attendance, clearly Account Synchronization is one of the top cloud integration challenges. Here’s how we defined the requirements:

• The need to load Accounts into Salesforce CRM  (Here we talked about the importance of data translation – “this is a mapping exercise.”)
• The need to load Contacts, associate them with Accounts, and maintain relationships (People often perform this task via Excel lookups, which can be difficult to set up and maintain.)
• The need to establish bi-directional synchronization between systems (Use cases include process-centric application integration and customer master data.)

We then reviewed the 5 potential ways that organizations are addressing this challenge today:

• Hand coding (Always the #1 competitor to a real data integration solution)
• Free tools (The Informatica Data Loader, for example,  is extremely popular with Salesforce.com customers. Here are some reasons to consider upgrading.)
• Outsourcing (There are benefits to having an SI manage data integration, but it should be in concert with a tool or platform.)
• On-Premise Tools for IT (I like this Informatica Perspectives post called Salesforce.com Integration – Inside Out or Outside In? What’s the right choice for you?)
• Cloud Services (Growing list of benefits for customers (rapid deployment, fewer resources, frequent upgrades, etc.) and ISVs (time to market, reduced development costs, etc.)

The rest of the webinar (which is available for viewing here) focused on demonstrations of how Informatica Cloud Services addresses the Account Sync challenge and customer examples. After lots of great questions, we made the following best practice recommendations:

• Don’t underestimate data loading (Take time to understand your data.)
• Don’t underestimate your data volumes (Ensure your data integration solution can scale.)
• Leverage external IDs to simplify integration (Bring over key IDs from on-premise objects.)
• Expect the unexpected (Aglity in a cloud-based integration solution is key.)

Here is the slideshare presentation:

Informatica Cloud Account Synchronization

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham.

Informatica Recognized by Salesforce.com for Cloud Data Integration

Informatica, the leading independent provider of enterprise data integration software, today announced that Informatica Cloud Data Loader Service for Salesforce CRM, a component of the Informatica Cloud, was honored with salesforce.com’s AppExchange Best of ‘09 Awards for data integration.

Some highlights from the press release:

• Salesforce.com customers have voted the Informatica Cloud the top data integration solution for the second consecutive year.
• Salesforce.com recognizes top AppExchange partner solutions based on user reviews. (Check out Informatica Cloud Services here.)
• More than 400 companies are now relying upon the Informatica Cloud to integrate Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform with on-premise databases, flat files, and enterprise applications.
• The Informatica Cloud is now running an average of 20,000 integration jobs per day and moving and manipulating more than four billon records a month.

Here’s a video summarizing the Informatica and Salesforce.com partnership:

Staging or Direct – SaaS Integration Best Practices?

I wrote a post today on the Informatica Perspectives Blog about the differences between point-to-point business application integration and staging enterprise data. It’s a topic that many organizations are discussing as it relates to cloud data integration. In order to avoid data fragmentation and data inaccuracies that ultimately result in decreased SaaS application adoption, a lower TCO, and ultimately poor business decisions, data from these cloud/SaaS applications must be integrated with each other, as well as with on-premise systems.

But for most companies, “the cloud” has  fundamentally changed the process of evaluating, purchasing, deploying, and managing software. Line of business (LOB) is commonly driving the technology purchase and implementation process, and in some cases, the central IT organization is being bypassed altogether. In larger organizations, LOB is attracted to faster time-to-results, subscription pricing, etc. and they’re adopting cloud applications to avoid the delays often associated with centralized corporate IT involvement. As this CIO.com cloud trends for 2010 article noted:

“Politics will drive decisions:  Cloud-based services have demystified compute services and increasingly business executives will ask IT managers about the cloud.”

With this in mind, are there new best practices emerging around cloud data integration? If so, what role does IT play? And if you’re in IT, do you provide the business with self-service access to production back-office systems or do you stage the data?

I’m interested in hearing about how this works in your company. Got any best-practices to share? Here’s a whitepaper on the topic that might be useful (registration required).

Data Loader Service: Most Popular Appexchange Free App

With over 55 customer reviews and 2000+ installs, the Data Loader Service is now the most popular free app on the Salesforce.com AppExchange:

Check out these reviews (primarily from Salesforce administrators):

• Great tool for automated data backup
• Data Management LIFESAVER!!!!
• One of if not the best applications on the App Exchange

Why not give the gift of bi-directional Salesforce data extraction and loading this holiday season?

And, as I said on my recent cloud data integration predictions post, “may all of your clouds be connected in 2010!”

Rock the AppExchange Vote – Data Loader Service 2010

Last year the free Data Loader Service was recognized by “the cloud crowd” as The Best Data Integration Tool on the Saleforce.com AppExchange. Well this year the reviews have been piling up for the Cloud Data Loader Service as well as for the Cloud Data Synchronization Service. Here are a couple of examples from November:

Data Loader Service

Data Synchronization Service

 

 

 

 
And here is the complete list of 2008 AppExchange App of the Year winners. To vote, simply post a review here:

• Data Loader Service (free)
• Data Synchronization Service

Your support is very much appreciated!