Cloud Integration Newsletter

Interested in the topic of cloud integration? You may be interested in subscribing to the monthly Informatica Cloud newsletter. Here are some of the articles featured this month:

• Adopting Salesforce CRM: The Importance Of Data Integration
• How Is Cloud Computing Changing The Role of IT?
• Strategic Integration: 10 Business-Building Tips
• Cloud Politics Remain Top of Mind
• Down with Appliances, Up with the Clouds!
• SaaS Momentum Skyrocketing: Don’t Wait to Integrate!
• Integration: The Cure for SaaS Sprawl?

Cloud Integration: Not Just Hosted Software

Dan Niemann, VP or Sales and Business Development for the Informatica Cloud, makes some solid points about a true software as a service application not simply being “a hosted version of software” in this  CBR article:

“To me SaaS is as much about ease of use and who consumes it as it is about the infrastructure. Without hardware to install and configure, more people can consume software, that’s why salesforce.com has been so successful – more people can consume their software and IT is no longer a bottleneck. We’ve taken that design paradigm to heart.”

“The only other vendor that has cloud-based integration has taken a traditional usage paradigm and is basically delivering lines and boxes and complex middleware just in a cloud environment and I think that is undervaluing the promise of cloud computing.“

See the post “If it’s not Multitenant it’s not Really SaaS” for a good discussion on this topic. You can read the entire article here.

Oracle CRM On Demand Synchronized with Salesforce.com

Migrating from Oracle CRM On Demand to Salesforce.com? Looking for bi-directional synchronization between CRM applications? Check out this new Informatica Cloud integration demonstration. It’s drag and drop, point and click, cloud-to-cloud data integration as an on-demand service. Be sure to check out the working beta of the Informatica Marketplace for more examples.

Top In(tegrate) the Cloud Posts of 2009

Call me crazy, but I enjoy the annual Best and Worst, Top 10, and Prediction articles that are everywhere this time of year. And while I’m disappointed that none of my LucidEra posts made it on to Donald Farmer’s 2009 business intelligence blog highlight reel, here are the post popular In(tegrate) the Cloud Posts for the year:

1. You Know You Work for a European Company When (clearly SAP’s new Budweiser marketing strategy works – 5000+ views for this BusinessObjects video)
2. If It’s Not Multitenant, It’s Not Really SaaS (generated some good discussion)
3. The Importance of Data Integration in the Era of Cloud Computing (one of the first posts on this blog)
4. Data Loader Service: Most Popular AppExchange Free App (have you downloaded it yet?)
5. IDC Publishes Cloud Services Benefits and Challenges (who hasn’t used these graphs in a slide yet?)
6. Questions to Ask a Salesforce Integration Solution Provider (is it multitenant? how much training is required? can I try before I buy?)
7. Cloud Integration Use Cases (replication is the primary based on the poll)
8. Salesforce Integration with BigMachines (connecting 2 very popular SaaS apps)
9. Cloud Integration for Competitive Advantage (competing on integration?)
10. Twitter and Salesforce Integration with the Informatica Cloud (big news – Twitter is popular!)

And I’m pleased to say that traffic is growing. More validation that, “Cloud Data Integration will eclipse both security and availability to be the defining capability that drives Cloud Computing success?” Perhaps.

Thanks for reading (and commenting). Happy New Year!

Xactly and Salesforce Integration

Okay, I guess it’s cloud integration demo week…
Here’s another example of the power of the new Informatica Cloud Platform. Check out this quick demonstration of Xactly Incent integration with Salesforce. It’s point and click and drag and drop. Easy for line of business managers and SaaS application administrators to build and maintain bi-directional cloud application synchronization.

Customer Master Data Integration: Microsoft Access and Salesforce.com

Recently I wrote about some of the most common use cases I’ve seen for Salesforce application and data integration. One of the most common is customer master data synchronization. Here’s a common scenario:

• You have Account and Contact customer master data sitting in a legacy Microsoft Access-based CRM system and you need to load it into the Contact object in salesforce.com (welcome to the cloud!)
• You need to quickly and easily connect to the Microsoft Access data and Salesforce.
• Data must be transformed before it’s loaded into Salesforce.
• Contacts and must be linked to the parent Account in Salesforce.
• Data integration tasks need to be scheduled to run at specific times.
• You want to create a nightly batch data integration job for dependent tasks.
• And finally you want to add new records to Microsoft Access and watch as they’re loaded into Salesforce.

Here’s how it looks with a multitenant, cloud-based data integration as a service solution that is designed for non-technical users:

Salesforce Integration Customer Success

Earlier this week I posted some of the more typical use cases I’ve seen for data integration as a service, specifically for salesforce.com customers. I want take a moment to highlight some of the amazing Salesforce customer feedback we’ve seen over the last few week for the AppExchange data synchronization service:

You check out all of the AppExchange reviews here and learn more about the multitenant Data Synchronization Service here.

Cloud Integration Services for Salesforce

Here’s a brief presentation from this week’s destinationCRM webinar.

Salesforce Integration from the Market Leader

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham.

Cloud Data Integration Discussion

Check out this interview with Dr. Chris Boorman over on the BeyeNetwork. He very succinctly defines cloud computing as “computing that is beyond the firewall of an enterprise.” He goes on to break “the cloud” down into the following categories:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

As “the cloud” further fragments enterprise data, he stresses that “data is the DNA of a company” so  it is important to be able to answer the following questions:

• How do you remain in control of your data?
• How do you ensure that the data and the apps you’re running beyond the firewall are synchronized with the applications you have within the firewall?
• How do you trust your data?

What should an enterprise look for in cloud data integration?

1.  An organization that:

• Understands cloud computing and is viable
• Offers choice to solve the problem from within the enterprise (inside-out), Or from outside the enterprise (outside-in)
• Has a track record of customer success in providing cloud data integration

2.  Technology solutions that:

• Provide simple self-service browser-based solutions for business users while providing IT with the overall visibility of who is doing what with the data
• Reside where the data exists – either alongside the SaaS application, or on the IaaS platform, or on-premise
• Share metadata across SaaS, IaaS and on-premise in order to remain in control of all distributed data assets wherever they reside

Listen to the entire interview here and learn more about cloud data integration here.

Salesforce to Salesforce Integration

Here’s a cloud integration demo that I think is pretty interesting – how to easily integrate one Salesforce instance with another. The use case might be an enterprise account looking to consolidate departmental implementations or an acquisition that results in the need to unify two disparate orgs.

Other use cases? A useful example of Salesforce integration? Let me know what you think.

More information is available here.