Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

Many companies who have never embarked on an integration project are now plunging head first into their first ever integration projects; at the same time, many departments within larger corporations are also tackling their first integration projects. There seems to be various reasons why companies and departments are starting to look at integration now, such as CRM implementations, Business Intelligence, and mergers and acquisitions. I won’t get into that here. The important thing is more and more IT departments are starting some form of data or application integration project, and are looking for ways to get started.

The goal of this post is to list the top five things IT directors need to ensure a successful integration project.

1. Determine the goal of your integration project. An integration project should be pursued from a pure cost/benefit standpoint. How will it advance your business goals? Are you trying to build an executive dashboard so the CEO and CFO can graphically see marketshare, profitability, and sales trends? Then you’re going to need to build a data warehouse with data from various sources, including ERP, CRM, text files and your website, from which your executive reporting tool can make pretty business pictures. Do you want to enable your sales executives to know everything that is going on with your customers, so they can avoid accepting a purchase order from an account that is on credit hold? That would require synchronization between your CRM system and your ERP or accounting system. Are you hoping to make it easier for your suppliers to provide you with shipping information and invoices so they just automatically show up in your wholesale or retail management system? Then you need to EDI-enable these systems.

2. Determine what kind of integration you’re pursuing. Is it a migration, an ETL project, an application integration or B2B integration? Here’s a nice little diagram that can help you with this:

If you’re trying to synchronize data between your CRM system and your ERP or Accounting System (often the ERP/Accounting system is the “system of record,” meaning that’s where the customer master data is stored), then it’s an interface integration. This requires real-time, or near real-time movement of bits and pieces of data back and forth between both systems at a business logic level. On the other hand, if you’re trying to extract data from operational systems, such as your ERP or CRM system and dump them into a repository in order to slice and dice the data for more accurate reporting on your business, then you’re looking at ETL. The requirements here are usually for nightly, weekly or even monthly batch loads from your operational systems, usually late at night or on weekends when these systems that run your business won’t take too big of a performance hit.

3. Determine the sources and destinations of your data. The best way to break down an integration project into easily understandable steps, and to calculate the time and effort it will take, is to determine where the data is coming from and where it’s going to. I’m not just talking about what applications you’re moving data to and from, but also what tables or data objects, and how many. So, for example, if your goal is for your sales people to close a sale in your CRM system so it will kick-off a sales order in your ERP system, this would involve:

• The Accounts or Company object in your CRM system
• The Contact object in your CRM system
• The Opportunity object in your CRM System
• The Product object in your CRM system

That’s four objects in your CRM system. You also have to determine object name and count in your ERP system, as well as determine how data from your CRM system will change, combine or interact for it to make sense to your ERP system and to successfully create a sales order.

4. Determine your resources. Many times an integration project is so easy that it can be done in-house with minimal effort expended. Sometimes what you thought might be very easy turns out to be a very complicated project that drags on for eight months with the current manpower at your disposal. Knowing who you have available and what his or her skills are is crucial. Some integration projects require just one business analyst. These could be simple migrations such as exporting data into a flat file from one system and importing that same flat file. Sometimes Microsoft Excel is all you need to do this. However, most integrations are not as simple. Interface type integrations require lots of heavy programming. You would need somebody familiar with java, C++, and web services programming skills, and they don’t come cheaply! These issues are largely mitigated by commercially available integration tools, which are typically designed for use by a business analyst. If your company has no technical resources (rare), or if they are all allotted to other projects and not available for your project, then it might make sense to hire a consultant for a time to do the integration for you.

5. Choose your approach: Build vs. Buy. This is largely determined by number 4 above. It doesn’t make sense to invest in a $100,000 ETL tool if all you’re doing is loading data from a mailing list into your CRM system. It can also be the death of a project if you decide to use in-house resources, and it ends up taking up to 6-9 months, or requires a highly-paid java programmer to update your custom code every time you want to add a field to your CRM to ERP synchronization piece. It’s up to you. It might not be too much of a headache to do it in-house if it’s a fairly straightforward integration with few to any changes in business logic, and if data structure and field names are the same. If, however, you, have to transform the data in some way, or you’re integrating between two completely different data sources or data types (which covers the majority of integrations), then you should opt for a data integration tool. Most of the time your urgent integration project will not be your last. Because people come and people go, and high-valued technical resources are constantly being poached by other companies, an integration tool that is easy to learn and use will enable you to tackle present and future integrations without having to rely on the knowledge locked away in the brain of your top developer.

By Fernando Labastida

The hottest trend in the IT channel and VAR market, according to CMP’s ChannelWebNetwork, is the move to managed services and business software. To achieve more than 10-15 percent growth in a market dominated by hardware-oriented VARS, solution providers need to offer solutions and focus on software, states Craig Zarley in “How to Grow Your Business.”

A new crop of fast-growth software VARS are popping up and focusing on business applications in the SMB market. CRM is experiencing the biggest growth and adoption amongst solution-oriented VARS, with Microsoft Dynamics taking the charge, and Software-as-a-service vendor Salesforce.com, a formidable challenger, according to Rick Whiting in his analysis of the “VARBusiness 2007 State of Technology Survey: Business Software” in his article “How To Succeed in Business Software.”.

“Today it’s less about the technology and more about the business processes these applications will enable on a vertical industry basis,” said Michael Speyer, a Forrester Research analyst, as quoted in the article by Whiting.

Whiting cites concerns, however, by solution providers surveyed about adopting business software. The high cost of software presents major obstacles, as well as the time and expense of training, “…and the complexities of integrating business applications with other information technology.”

In order for the new business software VAR to truly maximize its growth potential, it must focus on its customers’ business needs, fine-tuning these applications to their particular business processes. However, for customers to maximize the value of business applications such as CRM or ERP, they must be seamlessly integrated with other applications in the enterprise, including legacy applications, flat files and unstructured data. For solution providers to spend valuable time custom coding these integrations instead of focusing on value-added business consulting is a waste of time and can result in important cost overruns for the VAR.

An independent data and application integration tool is a good solution to help VARS focus on high-margin business-oriented activities.

What is an independent data and application integration tool? It is a tool that is a stand-alone product. Companies such as Oracle, IBM, SAP and Business Objects all have their own data integration tools, but because they are part of the afore-mentioned enterprise software companies their neutrality is compromised.

Partnering with them for data integration purposes can cause channel conflicts with whatever business application the solution provider chooses as its bread and butter.

VARs need to look for integration tools that meet the following criteria: they need to be easy to use, with minimal to no coding; lightweight and easy to install yet robust and scalable with superior performance; have a variety of connectors that include legacy applications such as COBOL or ISAM, flat files, databases, major applications, and can play in a web services or service oriented architecture (SOA) environment; must provide data quality assessment and remediation; the company must provide great pre- and post-sales support; and finally, it must have a low total cost of ownership.

Solution providers should not have to worry about long implementation or installation times, nor promote an integration solution that costs almost as much as the business application that is their life-blood. It must be an enabler, not a project in and of itself.

Data and application integration tools can help VARS and solution providers in a variety of ways.

The most obvious is in the migration of data from legacy applications to new applications. New cutting edge on-demand applications are nothing without data, or rather nothing without clean or accurate data. Data integration tools, with data profiling and remediation capabilities, are key to successful software migration projects because of productivity and speed gains in using a visual GUI-based design tool.

With an increasing number of VARS focusing on CRM technology, and the popularity of CRM as the repository of record for customer data, CRM projects can quickly turn into major integration projects. Users learn to love the user interface of applications such as Salesforce.com, according to Raphael Spinelli, CEO of SalesAware, a Salesforce.com System Integrator in Mexico City.

“Salesforce.com users want to be able to view sales transactions, product availability, and trouble tickets from their Salesforce.com user interface,” said Spinelli from his office in Mexico City’s swank Polanco district. “We now have to help them integrate with applications such as SAP or homegrown applications,” added Spinelli.

SalesAware uses a data integration tool in order to provide quick and easy integrations between Salesforce and other applications, while they focus on the more value-added tasks of helping their customers, such as one of Mexico’s largest transportation companies, with business process improvements using Salesforce.com.

While VARs and solution providers are starting to transition to a software and business process improvement model as their strategy for fast growth, there are still some considerations to help make this strategy more productive. Data and application integration tools are often overlooked, and integrators often feel they should be able to do the job themselves. However, custom coded integration projects can become a spaghetti-like, point-to-point, brittle nightmare. VARS and solution providers are much better off partnering with an integration tools vendor to handle the mundane integration tasks, and focus on the important revenue generating activities that provide value to their customers.

Fernando Labastida is an account executive with Pervasive Software, and serves the Northern California, Pacific Northwest, Southwest Canada, Minnesota, and all of Latin America. He can be reached at http://www.labastida.com or 512-945-9273.

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