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Informatica On Demand services have been deployed by more than 100 salesforce.com
customers of all sizes and were recently voted “Best Data Integration Tool of 2008” by salesforce.
com customers on AppExchange for their ease of use. Informatica’s on-premise data integration
solutions are deployed at many of salesforce.com’s largest customers around the world. These
solutions are often used to handle complex business rules in real time and process very large
volumes of data.

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For organizations that are looking for an easy-to-use Salesforce integration offering that is
designed for IT professionals, Informatica offers a powerful and affordable on-premise solution,
Informatica Integration Pack for Salesforce CRM™ (iPack).
For organizations that already use Informatica PowerCenter, our fl agship data integration
software, Informatica offers a native Salesforce connector, Informatica PowerExchange® for
Salesforce CRM™.

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Informatica’s Approach to Salesforce Integration
As the recognized market leader in data integration, Informatica has worked with salesforce.com
customers of all sizes since 2005 and understands that no single approach to SaaS integration
will meet every customer’s needs. Accordingly, we have created a complete portfolio of data
integration solutions for Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform. These solutions enable
companies to ensure data accuracy, improve business decisions and operations, and derive
maximum value from their Salesforce investment.
For Salesforce administrators looking to quickly synchronize their Salesforce data with on-premise
systems, Informatica offers several easy-to-use, self-service IaaS offerings called Informatica On
Demand services.

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For Salesforce customers, these are the three most common integration approaches:
1. Hand coding. Whether done in-house or by consultants, it may seem a quick fi x at fi rst, but it
can rapidly become time consuming, error prone, and very expensive to maintain.
2. On-premise integration platforms and tools. These are installed inside a company’s fi rewall
on a server or an appliance provided by a vendor, then maintained by IT. For organizations
where a skilled systems integrator or IT staffer will implement and manage the Salesforce CRM
integration, this is a good choice.
3. Integration as a service (IaaS) offerings. This refers to on-demand SaaS integration that
itself takes place in the cloud and is maintained by the integration vendor. IaaS is ideal for
organizations with limited IT resources and/or those relying on a Salesforce administrator or
line-of-business analyst to perform and manage the integration

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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.

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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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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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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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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 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