CRM - October 2008 - (Page SF18)

18 October 2008 Sponsored Content Integration Strategies – Realize the Full Value of CRM Salesforce.com is so easy to get up and running that users tend to expect instant access to all of their business information— about customers, contacts, leads, opportunities, and more. Although SaaS applications like Salesforce.com offer immediate results, their integration with other systems in a company is critical to realizing the full value they offer. It has been noted that SaaS applications provide little differentiation unless they are integrated with existing back-end applications that are often core to a company’s operations. Leveraging these existing assets and providing a comprehensive view of information is essential to ensuring user adoption does not plateau with newly introduced SaaS applications. This consolidated view of information is increasingly important in relation to CRM systems and in particular Salesforce.com, which are often the primary source of information for tracking sales contacts, leads, pipeline data and quarterly forecasts. Without integrated access to shipping details, product schedules, etc. that may be sourced from existing ERP applications, the ability to establishing Salesforce.com as the primary source of information may be limited or delayed. KEY ISSUES TO CONSIDER: Maximize the Business Value of SaaS Applications Getting information into Salesforce.com. Back-end systems contain some of the most valuable corporate assets in a company as they often represent many decades of business knowledge and operational experience. For a Salesforce.com solution to be useful from the start, the information such as order history, opportunities and contacts contained in back-end systems must be migrated to the new solution. Synchronizing information between Salesforce.com and back-end systems. Many organizations have existing back-end systems that have been the systems of record for critical corporate information about customers, products, orders and more for many years. Salesforce.com solutions need to synchronize information with the particular systems of record so the company can have a single, accurate and real-time view of customers and products. Extracting information from Salesforce.com. Most companies generate a wide variety of operational and business intelligence (BI) reports based on data from multiple systems. While Salesforce.com offers rich reporting capability, this functionality is limited to what is contained within the application in isolation. Therefore, information from Salesforce.com must be easily transferable into existing reporting and BI applications to provide holistic dashboards for increased visibility. Traditionally, companies had just two choices for solving application integration problems—use complex and extremely costly software platforms or write custom code. As a consequence, most companies opted to develop custom code for integration, which has become the most widely used integration solution. Organizations have quickly realized that maintaining custom code is a labor-intensive and timeconsuming process with “hidden costs” that go well beyond the initial coding. Companies report significant stress trying to manage their growing business via manual processes. INTEGRATION AS A SERVICE = GREATER EFFICIENCY Integration as a Service, or IaaS, offers the ability to remove the complexity and the overhead associated with traditional integration solutions. This approach to rapid integration is gaining in popularity because it results in greater efficiency and lower costs when used to solve integration challenges, particularly with Salesforce.com applications. IaaS can be provided in a number of ways depending on customer requirements, including whether the majority of integration is for on premise applications or those provided on demand. Integration as a Service reduces complexity by doing only what’s needed—connectivity, transformation, workflow and management—to rapidly integrate two or more applications. By distilling application integration problems into these four steps and offering them on demand, IaaS delivers simplicity and eliminates the need to write any code to implement integration projects. ABOUT CAST IRON SYSTEMS Cast Iron’s IaaS offerings provide an on demand solution that enable companies to integrate in days™, instead of weeks or months. Using Cast Iron’s “no coding” approach, hundreds of companies have deployed thousands of integration projects in just days. By taking advantage of the Cast Iron solution companies can obtain the full benefits of Salesforce.com in just days. Learn more through free whitepapers, webinars, and case studies by visiting www.castiron.com or call 650.230.0705 to find out more about Cast Iron's Solutions. In a fiercely competitive business environment that requires the pace of business and technology to accelerate, companies need to adapt to change faster, and their IT departments must deliver innovative technology solutions rapidly and at a lower cost. http://www.castiron.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.castiron.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - October 2008

CRM - October 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality�Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Sprinting Toward Disaster? SAP�Retains Market-Share Lead in�CRM A�Week of Strong Customer�Service CRM�on Twitter Build a Good Event and They Will Come Required Reading There's No Place Like Home The New Breed of CRM�Consultant The Price is Right...You Hope How Much Marketing is Too�Much? The�Sweet Smell of High-Quality�Service The Next Act! For An Acquisition Some Stories Never Get Old CRM�Eases the Pressure For WIKA�Instruments Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - October 2008

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