Data Integration Solutions for Salesforce

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Data Integration Solutions for Salesforce

Rex

The answer isn’t to host an on-premise software solution or appliance originally designed for
IT users and simply call it “a cloud solution.” Informatica has done something entirely different.
With 15 years of enterprise data integration experience, global resources, and a major R&D
investment, Informatica has developed an innovative suite of IaaS offerings called Informatica
On Demand Services.
These robust data integration services are expressly designed for on-demand deployment and
for ease of use. By radically simplifying the user experience, while providing a robust, scalable
data integration solution, Informatica delivers on the promise of cloud data integration

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Conclusion
Integrating cloud-based application data with on-premise systems is a new IT challenge that
requires a new approach: integration as a service (IaaS). IaaS must be easy for a new type
of user: someone with minimal IT experience who needs results on demand, doesn’t want to
spend a lot to get them, and can’t pull the IT team away from other responsibilities.
IaaS must provide intuitive dashboards, easy-to-use setup wizards, and admin-friendly
productivity tools that let Salesforce administrators handle every step of the integration process
themselves, with minimal help from IT. IaaS makes Salesforce administrators more selfsuffi
cient and productive.

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Based on the Informatica Platform
Most importantly, Informatica On Demand services are based on Informatica’s comprehensive
data integration platform, which enables users to access, discover, cleanse, integrate, and
deliver timely, trusted data to the extended enterprise—any data, anywhere, at any time.
With proven reliability, scalability, and security, the Informatica Platform is capable of processing
the largest data volumes and most complex business rules.
Leveraging the power of the Informatica Platform, Informatica On Demand services offer the
convenience, usability, and fl exibility of on-demand deployment and a user interface designed
for the line-of-business end user. For the cost-conscious business, these standalone services
help companies maximize the benefi ts of their Salesforce and other SaaS applications today
and in the future, as their business needs, technology, and data integration challenges grow
and change.

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Informatica On Demand services are also fully automated. Once a Salesforce administrator
creates and schedules a job, these services handle all the steps needed to keep data consistent
and current. This minimizes errors while freeing the IT staff to work on other things. It also ensures
results are precisely as timely as they need to be. Administrators can easily schedule jobs to run
daily, hourly, or by minutes for near real-time synchronization, or less frequently for less timesensitive
scenarios. They can even create sequences of jobs in which the results of one drive the
next, for faster response to shifting business conditions.

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Over time, Informatica will enable partners to deliver their own process-specifi c integration
solutions in a similar manner.
Informatica On Demand services expedite time to value by eliminating hand coding completely.
Based entirely “in the cloud,” these services are designed to integrate directly with both Salesforce
and a variety of common on-premise systems and databases. Simple Web-based set-up wizards
and drag-and-drop functionality empower Salesforce administrators to create their own complex
automated data transformation tasks in a matter of hours—with minimal help from IT.

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Turnkey IaaS applications. These applications are designed for a specifi c integration task and
require absolutely no training to use. They work “out of the box” and are the fastest way to
accomplish such specifi c tasks as loading, replicating, or assessing quality of data. Best of
all, they coexist with and complement any data integration tool or method that salesforce.com
customers might have deployed. Informatica has developed three turnkey IaaS applications for
Salesforce CRM:
• Informatica On Demand Data Loader Service, which imports and exports data between
Salesforce CRM and fi les or databases
• Informatica On Demand Data Replication Service, which replicates Salesforce data to
internal systems for analysis or archiving
• Informatica On Demand Data Quality Assessment Service, which combines powerful data
analysis, matching, reporting, and monitoring to ensure that data is complete, consistent,
and accurate

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Informatica On Demand Services: IaaS from the
Integration Experts
Informatica On Demand services are true cloud-based, multitenant IaaS offerings that automate
moving, monitoring, and synchronizing data between back-end systems and Salesforce CRM. End
users need only launch their preferred Web browser and log in to Salesforce CRM to integrate data
from multiple databases and business applications.
Informatica On Demand services fall into two categories:
1. Powerful and fl exible IaaS tools. These tools are designed from the ground up to address the
needs of line-of-business users. They allow a Salesforce administrator to quickly build any
number of integration tasks to synchronize Salesforce data with corporate back-end systems.
The Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service™, which synchronizes Salesforce
data with on-premise, back offi ce databases and systems, is an example of an IaaS tool.
Informatica plans to deliver a data cleansing service in the near future

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Furthermore, such solutions are far beyond the minimal expertise of the line-of-business
employees who generally manage Salesforce and other SaaS applications. In an economy
where IT already lacks the resources to respond to every request from the business, this delays
data integration projects until an IT professional can squeeze them into an already overloaded
schedule—which may take weeks or even months.
As a result, IaaS is the emerging alternative to integrating cloud-based services with on-premise
applications. As with other cloud-based applications, IaaS is fl exible, easy to use, and speeds
time to value for a lower total cost and higher return on investment

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Integration as a Service: A Simpler Choice for
SaaS Integration
Salesforce and other SaaS applications are most popular among small and midsized companies
and individual departments that choose cloud applications for affordability and ease of
management. Traditional integration options such as hand coding or on-premise integration tools
tend to be a poor fi t for these users.