Integrating Salesforce CRM and SAP

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a video of Informatica Cloud integrating Salesforce.com data and SAP.

Congratulations to the destinationCRM 2011 CRM Market Leaders

Interested in the evolving CRM market? Planning on attending Dreamforce this month?

If you answered yes to either question, you’re going to want to take the time to read the 10th Annual CRM Market Leader award summary over on destinationCRM.

Here’s a summary of this year’s winners by category:

• Enterprise CRM Suite:  Salesforce.com
• Midmarket CRM Suite: Salesforce.com
• Small Business CRM Suite: Salesforce.com
• Sales Force Automation: Salesforce.com
• Incentive Management: Xactly
• Marketing Solutions: Marketo
• Business Intelligence: IBM (Cognos)
• Data Quality: Informatica
• Open Source CRM: Sugar CRM
• Consultancies: Innoveer

The magazine also announced their CRM Influential Leaders. They are:

• Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO – A Ubiquitous Presence
• Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO – The Deal Maker
• Esteban Kolsky, Thinkjar Founder and Principal – An Analyst’s Analyst
• Andrew Mason, Groupon Founder and CEO – A Group Leader
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Social Founder and CEO – The Social Butterfly
• Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn President and CEO – A Public Statement

Congratulations to this year’s winners! They are both impressive lists.  See you at Dreamforce!

Related articles

• Importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Oracle Rolls To $37 With Push From InQuira (blogs.forbes.com)
• Salesforce Irons it Out: 21st Century Social Enterprise Certified (zdnet.com)

What Do Salesforce.com Customers Care About?

Image via CrunchBase

I was asked a simple question yesterday: “What do Salesforce customers care about?” I found that after a lot of rambling and some whiteboard scribbling that my answer was not so simple. I thought I’d try it out here…and maybe get some input from some of you.

First of all, some background. I first became a Salesforce user back in 2005, while in product marketing at Business Objects (now owned by SAP and no longer a customer I suspect). At that point, I was primarily interested in customer analysis, customer references and  competitive intelligence (win / loss analysis and other sales reporting). In 2006 I joined Salesforce product management to work on developing an analytics product line. (This is when I discovered blogging – here are some early examples.) I spent a lot of time gathering input from customers about the types of dashboards and reports they’d like to see. (It’s nice to see that many of the requirements outlined here have now been delivered.) I also spent a lot of time with AppExchange analytics partners, before joining a SaaS BI start-up, where I became a CRM administrator for the first time. Since then I’ve spent most of my time thinking about leads, campaigns and opportunities, but I’m a huge fan of Salesforce Content and Chatter. I’ve also been involved in Eloqua and Marketo implementations along the way.

So, the point of the background is to say that I know what I care about as a Salesforce CRM customer, but as I started down the path of answering what was meant to be a simple question, I realized just how much salesforce.com has expanded over the past few years. Here are a few of the bullets I jotted down, recognizing that much of this will vary by organization size and industry.

CRM administrators:

• They care about user adoption, dashboards, business process, taking advantage of the latest features, data quality…and integration.
• These days when I want to know what a guru cares about I read, A Force Behind the Force blog. It’s solid.

Sales Operations:

• As above, but they also are responsible for sales enablement, forecasting, funnel management, quotas, compensation, bookings, billings…and integration.
• I like this blog, but generally, I find sales operations are interested in anything to do with metrics. (Here are a few of my old posts on this topic.)

Marketing Managers:

• Of course it depends on whether or not you work for a B2B or B2C organization and your role (demand gen, events, community, product marketing, corporate communications, etc.), but ultimately what marketing should be measured on is pipeline contribution: Leads that convert to opportunities that convert to closed business…that convert to happy customers…that convert to renewals, more business, etc.
• There are lots of great AppExchange apps for marketers, but I do wonder when the Marketing Cloud will be delivered by Salesforce natively. The Lead and Campaign objects could use a refresh…

Customer Service and Support:

• I’m no Service Cloud guru, but I do know the latest release was a big deal at the New York Cloudforce event in March and more and more organizations are moving to customer service and support in the cloud. Incorporating social media and gaining a single view of customer, products, etc. is also a key value proposition of cloud data integration and master data management (MDM).
• Here’s a solid post on the Salesforce Service Cloud opportunity and a video on social media and customer service.

IT Roles: Architects, DBAs, etc.

• I wrote a post recently called, Is Hybrid the New Black?  To me, it’s fascinating to see attitudes from this audience evolve from cloud skeptical, to cloud curious, to cloud first. It’s as if the Big Switch has been flipped and the so-called “Cloud Rush” is on in IT.
• Look to see significant enterprise IT attendance at Dreamforce 2011. Salesforce has done a great job of gaining trust from CIOs and all levels of IT over the past few years. Clearly this is also an audience that understands the importance of cloud integration.

Application and Platform Developers

• Force.com anyone? I must admit that I’m losing track of all of the evolving platform as a service (PaaS) components. Heroku remains a separate website, and it looks like they’ve gone back to the X-Force branding of 2005 (Appforce, Siteforce, VMforce, etc.).
• What do Salesforce developers care about? If you want get into Apex Code and learn some great tips and tricks, check out the Force Monkey blog. Be sure to also spend time on the Developer Force community site.

So how did I do? Clearly it’s not so easy to summarize what Salesforce customers care about as the on-demand applications and platform have evolved and expanded. One thing I do believe is consistent across all constituents is that all Salesforce customers care about data, which is why data integration, data quality and overall data management are always such hot topics.

To me, what has remained the same is how passionate Salesforce customers are about pushing the boundaries of cloud computing and getting the maximum value from their investment. Salesforce.com has done a fantastic job of creating communities of evangelists and an ecosystem of partners….and the annual extravaganza is just around the corner.

See you @ #DF11. Oh, and here’s a video of Marc Benioff talking about his vision a few years ago…

Related articles

• Salesforce.com to Buy Radian6, a Bet on Social CRM (clickz.com)
• Live Blog: Interview with Parker Harris, Co-Founder Salesforce.com (readwriteweb.com)
• Salesforce.com Acquisition Points To Marketing Ambitions (informationweek.com)

Dreamforce to You Delivers in Orlando

I spent the weekend at a great Salesforce.com user group meeting in Orlando called Dreamforce 2 You. The event lived up to its name and did a great job of bringing the energy (and a few video highlights) from the annual San Francisco CRM and Force.com conference to the local community. The agenda was user-driven and I thought nicely representative of what’s top of mind for most Salesforce customers:

1. Salesforce.com Success Out-Of-The-Box
2. Data Management: There’s gold in them details (my session)
3. Marketing Automation
4. Deep Dive into Salesforce.com Reporting, Analytics, and Dashboards
5. SFA: Automation = Automagical to you and your users
6. Developing in the Cloud

Thank you and congratulations to the team who put the mini-Dreamforce conference together (Joshua, Jen and Jackie). It truly was the best Salesforce user group meeting I’ve attended with a great mix of customers, partners, Salesforce employees and of course content.

In the data management session, I focused on:

1. The importance of data integration to Salesforce customer success
2. The different data integration options available to Salesforce customers
3. What to look for in a cloud data integration solution

Here is the first section of the presentation. Be sure to let me know if you have any feedback or questions.

 

Related Articles

• A Tale of Two Communities Part II – Salesforce.com (socialfish.org)
• Salesforce.com: The enterprise, platform roads to $3 billion in revenue (zdnet.com)
• Beware Little CRM Tools (customerthink.com)

Forrester: 6 Categories SaaS Will Impact the Most

CIO.com recently featured a summary of Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert: How SaaS Will Impact 6 Key Software Categories.  They are:

1. IT Management Applications
2. CRM Software and productivity applications
3. ERP and Supply Chain Software
4. Business Intelligence
5. HR Software
6. Platform and Middleware Solutions

No big surprises here, but the article also provides some solid recommendations for source executives, “in light of increased SaaS adoption.”

“Sourcing executives must prepare for a hybrid landscape where SaaS co-exists with on-premise and hosted solutions, with many new vendors in the overall software portfolio. To navigate this complex environment, sourcing professionals should consider weighing the valuable aspects of SaaS — such as functionality, community, and accessibility — with risk elements — like vendor viability, vendor lock-in, and security.”

The Benefits of Cloud Integration for Sales and Marketing

People often are surprised by the concept of “self-service data integration” or the fact that  integration can be managed directly by sales or marketing managers and not necessarily by traditional IT organizations. Here’s an example of cloud data integration in action:

Related Articles

• Informatica launches Cloud Express service (v3.co.uk)
• 5 Paths To The New Data Integration (informationweek.com)
• Cloud App Integration: What’s the Best Path? (pcworld.com)

Tapping Into the Value of Your Cloud Application Data

Whether your a sales operations manager, analyst, CRM administrator or information architect, integrating cloud application data with other sources for reporting and analysis across systems has become a critical business requirement. The challenge with traditional data integration approaches is the frequency of change to the cloud application data model. How many new custom fields or objects did you add to Salesforce today? What was IT’s role in the change management process? How long were you willing to wait for your data integration scripts to be updated?

As one Salesforce customer put it in this AppExchange review:

“With a product like Salesforce.com, which gives you so much power to do quick database configuration changes, you need a product like Informatica Cloud to give you that same agility on the data integration side. What good is being able to add a new field in to Salesforce.com in just minutes if it takes months to get the data you want in to that field? For us, Informatica Cloud has all but eliminated that problem.”

Even Informatica’s own IT organization recognized the value of a cloud-based data replication service. According to Peter Vanderhaak,

“Once we realized how robust and easy to use Informatica Cloud could be, the following day we had a replication job moving data into a test data warehouse target – capturing incremental data changes and easily adaptable against an ever changing Salesforce data model. This would have taken weeks of development effort in a constantly changing SFA environment in the middle of a project that was still determining what fields and objects to create. Additionally, the ongoing maintenance would have caused major headaches and increased run-rate costs.“

Well today I noticed this 5-star AppExchange review and I thought it was worth sharing:

Isn’t time you looked to see if cloud data replication might help you better tap into the value of your data?

Salesforce CRM 2011 Predictions

Image via CrunchBase

Better late than never, Alex Dayon from Salesforce.com weighs in with his 2011 CRM predictions. He predicts 3 major trends emerging this year:

1. Increased importance of social networking
2. Enterprise collaboration (as highlighted in this preview for the upcoming Salesforce Chatter Super Bowl ad)
3. Broader business intelligence dashboards and decision making

Today is the last day of the fiscal year for my friends at Salesforce. I suspect many of them are now busy at work on their FY2012 V2MOM.

Related Articles

• Salesforce Buys Superbowl Ads To Promote Its New “Facebook For Businesses” (CRM) (businessinsider.com)
• Salesforce Launches Chatter.com For Any Business With Company Email Addresses (webpronews.com)
• How worried should Salesforce.com be about Microsoft’s cloud based CRM offering? (customerthink.com)

Data as a Service: D&B360 and Informatica Cloud

Have you heard about D&B360? If you’re going to Dreamforce next week, you most certainly will. It’s Data-as a Service (DaaS). According to today’s press release with Informatica, “DaaS is changing how businesses access and use information by providing on-demand access to the essential insights business end-users need to do their jobs, reducing data quality challenges and improving productivity.”

The announcement continues:

“D&B360 allows enterprise software providers to easily embed D&B data and other essential business knowledge directly into their applications. D&B360 is designed to quickly integrate with business software solutions that use commercial company or professional contact data, such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation, business intelligence (BI), master data management (MDM) and marketing automation.”

So what does this have to do with cloud integration? According Ron Papas, general manager, Informatica Cloud: “We see data-as-a-service as an opportunity for cloud-based data integration because organizations today must be able to trust the data at their fingertips in order to satisfy their customers and grow their business.”

The announcement goes on to explain that:

“Informatica Cloud is the enabling, back-end integration platform for D&B360, providing critical data integration, data synchronization and data quality as an on-demand service. Through the integration and synchronization capabilities provided by Informatica, users can benefit from automatically updated insight from D&B’s database, including the world’s largest collection of businesses and family tree structures.”

As I mentioned, D&B and Informatica will both be exhibiting at the salesforce.com Dreamforce conference next week:  Booths #500 (Informatica) and #525 (D&B), where they will be demonstrating the new D&B360 and Informatica Cloud capabilities.

Related Articles

• Cloudera-Informatica Deal Opens Broader Horizons for Both (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• D&B Launches D&B360TM, Expanding Data Leadership into Data-as-a-Service Solutions (eon.businesswire.com)
• Informatica Aims toward $800 Million in 2011 (arnoldit.com)

Getting Ready for 2011 Predictions

Last year, when it comes to cloud integration, Informatica made the following prediction:

“Cloud Data Integration will eclipse both security and availability to be the defining capability that drives Cloud Computing success.”

Well, after a busy year which saw IBM acquire CastIron and Dell acquire Boomi, clearly we weren’t alone in our thinking. I’ll post some 2011 predictions shortly (kind of busy with a little event called Dreamforce at the moment, amongst other things), but I wanted to point you to a great post from Mr. CRM, Paul Greenberg: Looking Back at 2010 – In 2010. When it comes to cloud / CRM integration, he makes the following points:

“Companies are looking to integrate to provide best of breed solutions since most companies – technology companies that is – are realizing that they can’t do it alone.”

and

“But the social vendors like Lithium, Radian6 etc. are all realizing that they need to integrate with traditional CRM systems and InsideView continued its relentless drive to integrate with everything including the basil plants that are growing inside varying foodies homes – and they’ve been a happy success accordingly with integrations to most of the CRM standards out there.”

Be sure to check out the full post here.