Video: Unlock your SAP Back Office with Force.com

This Salesforce.com demonstration  is a great example of the power of cloud integration.

 

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• Salesforce.com offers to ‘unlock’ SAP’s core (infoworld.com)
• Unlock the Power of Force.com @Salesforce (slideshare.net)
• Salesforce.com to ‘unlock’ SAP’s Core Software for ‘social Enterprises’ (pcworld.com)

Informatica Cloud Winter 2012 in Action

This week Informatica announced the 11th release of Informatica Cloud. Featuring a new Contact Validation Service, expanded cloud connectivity and many new enterprise features. I summarized the importance of the announcement to the company, customers and partners on the Perspective blog and we hosted a webinar reviewing the new capabilities here. Here’s the recording.

Related articles

• Informatica’s Integration Cloud Bridges SAP, Salesforce, Others (readwriteweb.com)
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Cloud Integration Do’s and Don’ts

I moderated a webinar today with a Director of IT who is truly cloud first.  The topic was cloud data integration and the impact the right strategy can have on your Salesforce.com and overall SaaS application implementation success. The discussion also featured implementation guidance from one the top systems integrator partners of both Informatica Cloud and Salesforce – Silverline. Gireesh Sonnad, a partner at the firm, outlined what he sees as the Top Cloud Integration Do’s and Don’ts.

Cloud Integration Do’s:

1. Build well rounded, cross-functionalimplementation core team
2. Pay special attention to understanding your complete process and data workflow
3. Make sure to compare your legacy application accessibility to the integration platform capabilities
4. Take advantage of  SaaS application (in this case Salesforce CRM) and Informatica Cloud native functionality (External IDs, Upserts, Error Logging, etc.)
5. Document what you build (You will need to refer to it often)

Cloud Integration Don’ts:

1. DON’T underestimate value of integration to overall SaaS adoption (Workflows are cross platform in real life, your systems should be also!)
2. DON’T ignore the value of detailed use cases and end-to-end testing with the entire team
3. DON’T try this without a full sandbox!
4. DON’T Worry, it WILL all work out in the end

Here’s the recording. Do you agree/disagree with this list? What else would you add?

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Integrating Salesforce CRM and SAP

Image via Wikipedia

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

The Importance of Integration to Salesforce Success

I hosted a webinar with Informatica Cloud customer Flexera last week. Here is the presentation. You can also watch the recording here.

The Importance of Integration to Salesforce Success

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham

 

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• Salesforce Data Integration Options (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
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• What Do Salesforce.com Customers Care About? (cloudintegration.wordpress.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

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• Salesforce.com: The enterprise, platform roads to $3 billion in revenue (zdnet.com)
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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?

The Role of Social Data in the Enterprise

Informatica‘s Chris Boorman posted his thoughts on the “ability to pull in data from the world of social media to understand more about our customers and prospects.” His blog post, Embracing Social Data Within The Enterprise, focuses on both cloud data integration and Master Data Management and provides examples of organizations that have blurred the lines between social and business data. His conclusion:

“From a data integration perspective this opens up a whole new world as companies look to gain competitive advantage and look to use this new world of data in previously un-thought of ways!”

Check out the blog post here and this video of Chris speaking about the role of social data in the enterprise:

…and here’s a demo of pretty cool cloud integration use case showing the ability to pull Twitter data into Salesforce CRM.

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.

Salesforce Integration: Crossing the Business IT Divide

Here is the cloud integration session we delivered last year at Dreamforce. Can’t wait until Dreamforce 2010. Our session this year is called: Sales Cloud Integration (No IT Help Required). (Login to Dreamforce.com required.) Be sure to register for the session at Dreamforce.com and join the #Integration Group. I hope to see you in December!