Integration as an on-demand service
Got SaaS? Salesforce? ServiceNow? Workday? Zuora? Amazon Redshift?
What about on-premises apps? SAP? Oracle? Microsoft Dynamics?
Don’t forget social media, big data, identity management, online storage and cloud analytics solutions…
I summarized 5 signs you need to re-think your cloud integration strategy on the SnapLogic blog today. Here’s an overview:
Does this sound familiar? You’re moving from an independent instance (or org) of Salesforce CRM to the consolidated corporate org. While there will definitely be business benefits in terms of visibility, reporting, customer/prospect communication, support, responsiveness, enablement and general leverage of corporate resources, it still represents a potential loss of autonomy. But it’s the right strategy for your business. Or is it?
Whether you ended up with multiple Salesforce orgs through mergers and acquisitions, separate brands or divisions, or through organic growth: at some point your organization is going to need to determine what is the right approach to multi-org consolidation. Here is an overview of 3 approaches to consider.
This week I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar featuring two great subject matter experts on the topic of cloud data management in the era of hybrid IT:
Mike West outlined why “hybrid” (or highly interwoven) deployments are the new normal for enterprise IT. He reviewed how the coud is radically changing the role of enterprise IT and why data management must be a part of an overall cloud strategy. He identified 7 trends of the so-called Boundary Free Enterprise and pointed to these 5 best practices:
Andrew Bartels shared the story of how he led the transition at his company to “cloud first” and drove Salesforce adoption from a peripheral system to a key driver of business performance and success. Andrew spoke passionately about the need to treat data as an asseet and concluded with the following words of advice:
I’ve embedded the video below and posted the slides on Slideshare. There’s some great insight here. I hope you find the discussion interesting and useful – I sure did!
Every year Salesforce announces the top partners by AppExchange category based on the quantity and quality of reviews. Today they blogged the winners. Congratulations to these partners who continue to demonstrate such a high degree of cloud customer adoption and success.
Sales: There are multiple winners in this category based on functional area.
Overall winner: Adobe EchoSign (They have now won 7 years in a row! I actually thought the award had only been around for 5 years. Hmmm…. They have an astounding 2040 reviews for their electronic signature application.)
Customer Service: Clicktools Surveys and Scripts by Clicktools
IT and Administration: Informatica Cloud Integration for Salesforce (Informatica has been recognized 5 years in a row as the top cloud integration solution!)
Marketing: Marketo (Big win over Eloqua in a very competitive category – congrats!)
Human Resources (HR): Jobscience for Professional Recruiting by Jobscience
ERP: Ascent by Precisio Business Solutions (I’m interested in feedback on this app. Thought you’d see Financial Force here.)
Collaboration: SpringCM Free Content Management from SpringCM
Analytics: Sales Pipeline Visualization by SalesClic (First I’ve heard of this app – looks interesting.)
Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to the Salesforce users who took the time to post their reviews!
Related Articles:
Have you recovered from Dreamforce 2012? Next week I’ll be at Oracle Open World talking about cloud integration and to be honest, I’d much rather write about the Marc Benioff show than register for Larry’s World at this point. (Although, I do wonder if we’ll see the 2nd tweet from Mr. Ellison and what his position will be on all things cloud this year. Remember the @Benioff boot out last time around? Some classic tweets.
I guess like a lot of people you could say I’m stuck in the PDC (Post Dreamforce Cloud) at this point. I’ve been spending time in the Dreamforce Chatter org reviewing sessions, watching YouTube videos and reading a plethora of blogger opinion about the conference (see links below). Sound familiar?
To bring back some of the #DF12 energy, today I hosted a webinar focused on some of the Dreamforce data management highlights. The presentation congratulated the 2012 Informatica Cloudy Award winners and featured live demonstrations of two of the hottest topics at the Informatica booth:
You can download the slides and watch the recording here:
Recently Informatica announced the availability of Cloud Integration Templates with the Summer 2012 release. I sat down with the lead product manager for this area of the product line and published the interview on the Informatica Perspectives blog. He described Cloud Integration Templates this way:
“In the world of mash-ups you have charts, components you bring into your framework. You size them and set certain attributes and it works. If you think of integration processes this way and define a Salesforce CRM to Netsuite integration as a Template for example, you should be able to just drop it in and it works (assuming the cloud connectivity is supported). Mash-up builders make it easy to build apps rapidly. What Cloud Integration Templates do is allow you to abstract integration processes so the developers can work with only what they need.”
I wanted to post an example of a Cloud Integration Template that has already become quite popular on the Informatica Marketplace – The Salesforce Aggregator Template. From the Marketplace description:
“The Salesforce Aggregator Template allows you to aggregate data using aggregation functions such as SUM, MIN, and MAX on any desired dataset. As a result, you can build summaries of a dataset from various field-level details. You can also perform mathematical and/or transactional operations between different source fields and place the result in a target.”
Here’s a video of the Cloud Integration Template in action. They are available to anyone taking a 30 day Informatica Cloud trial and in the Basic, Standard and Enterprise editions.
I did a quick comparison on Google Insights on a few keywords I track and thought I’d share the results. A few observations:
Google Trends has similar results. But when you go to Dice.com it’s a bit of a different story. There are:
But back to the keywords. I put in the terms “Data Integration” and “Application Integration“ to compare and they’re an order of magnitude greater than all three, albeit with a much longer history. Of note, however, is that the trend line for both of these more mature terms was on the decline for a few years but now seems to have leveled off somewhat.
I hosted a webinar this week with a CRM developer, Salesforce.com-focused systems integrator and cloud integration expert who provided a demonstration of Informatica Cloud. The focus of the discussion was the importance of data integration to CRM adoption and success in manufacturing. Here is the recording and the slides.
This Salesforce.com demonstration is a great example of the power of cloud integration.
Ok, there’s a lot I know I missed (usage-based integration services and the role of a vibrant Marketplace come to mind), but here is my set of 2012 cloud data integration predictions:
You can read the complete post on the Informatica Perspectives blog.
I’d love to hear any feedback and input you might have on the topic. We discussed some of these and other trends in a webinar today with Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies: Doing Data Right in the Cloud – How the Best Companies are Getting it Done. Here’s the recording on YouTube:
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