Data Integration Solutions for Salesforce

Rex

Data Integration Solutions for Salesforce

Rex

Software as a service (SaaS) is faster to deploy, simpler to upgrade, and 50 to 70 percent less
expensive than on-premise equivalents, according to McKinsey Consulting.1 Yet SaaS still presents
organizations with critical challenges:
• SaaS applications such as Salesforce CRM are typically managed by line-of-business users in
sales, marketing, human resources, and customer support organizations. In many cases, these
end users are also responsible for implementing and supporting the integration solution.

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SaaS applications “in the cloud” must integrate seamlessly with on-premise business data and
applications to be able to deliver operational effi ciency: providing end users with timely and
accurate information when and as needed.
• Although many SaaS projects start at a departmental level with simple integration requirements
in their initial phase of deployment, it is common for the integration complexity to grow as
end-user adoption increases and the SaaS application becomes part of a broad enterprise
architecture.

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SaaS applications require specialized integration services to allow smooth, trouble-free operations
across the corporate fi rewall. Yet end users, who have only the most basic IT skills, often must be
able to use SaaS applications with minimal IT support.
This white paper describes Informatica’s portfolio approach to SaaS integration and suggests
a solution to these seemingly confl icting needs: a data integration approach that scales with
customer requirements.

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The Growth of Software as a Service
An growing number of companies are adopting SaaS offerings. Research fi rm IDC predicts that in
2009, the SaaS market will grow more than 40 percent year over year. The same IDC report also
predicts that by the end of 2009, 76 percent of all U.S. companies will use at least one SaaS
application.2

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As companies look for ways to contain costs on IT infrastructure in a struggling economy, three
factors make SaaS a popular alternative to on-premise applications:
• Rapid implementation. With no hardware or software to deploy and manage, SaaS minimizes
the demand on IT resources and speeds time to production.
• Pricing. Subscription-based services mean businesses pay only for the resources they use and
readily monitor their use to quantify return on investment. This makes SaaS more affordable
upfront and easily scalable.
• Flexibility. Customizing SaaS applications to adapt to customer requirements takes place
through confi guration, not coding—something end users often can handle with minimal training.

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The Importance of SaaS Integration
Despite the potential benefi ts of SaaS, it can’t deliver on its promise if people can’t use it to
access all their information on demand—especially if that information is poorly synchronized
with corporate systems. In fact, Forrester Research reports that integration issues are software IT
decision makers’ top concern about SaaS and the main reason they hesitate to adopt it.3

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SaaS implementations often begin at a departmental level driven by a specifi c line-of-business
need, later expanding to other departments or to an enterprise level. Because each department
stores its own business-critical data in various back-end systems, small SaaS deployments
typically have simple integration requirements that can be met with point solutions implemented
by the application administrator or a systems integrator with minimal IT support.
Larger SaaS deployments, on the other hand, have more complex integration requirements
and must fi t into a company’s enterprise integration architecture. As a result, they require close
collaboration between IT and the line of business, and must be implemented, integrated, and
managed by IT using more sophisticated technology.

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Typical SaaS integration use cases include the following:
• Loading information into the SaaS system. Legacy back-end systems usually contain all the
operational and historic data needed by end users; without such data, the SaaS application is
not very useful.
• Synchronizing the SaaS system and back-end systems. Even with SaaS applications,
companies need to maintain current, accurate, real-time databases in-house to ensure secure,
reliable visibility into critical data at all times. This is especially critical with data that changes
every day, throughout the day, such as customer, sales, inventory, and product information.
• Extracting information from the SaaS system. If companies have existing compliance and
business intelligence applications, they must be able to transfer information into them from the
SaaS solution to generate the wide range of operational and strategic reports those enterprise
applications allow.

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Different Approaches to SaaS integration
Most mature providers of SaaS applications such as salesforce.com furnish customers and
vendors with a Web service-based API for integration. Customers must then decide what approach
to employ, based on factors including the size of their company, the availability and sophistication
of in-house resources, the size and complexity of the SaaS deployment, and the data volumes
they need to process.