Fernando Labastida’s Integration Blog

I might be a late-comer to the blogging world, but I think I’m learning the ropes pretty quickly. I’ve discovered an alternate dimension: the blogosphere. I’ve also discovered that there are now new types of blogs, such as newsy blogs, that look just like news sites; they’re very cool. The first one (well, the only one), that I’ve discovered is a blog/news site called SalesforceTimes.com. It was started by Adam Killam, the founder of the Vancouver Salesforce.com User Group. Adam has done a great job of aggregating news about Salesforce.com and creating original content, such as an article speculating about the possible sale of Salesforce.com. I think he’s also looking for some good content to add to the site as well.

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.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fernando_Labastida

By Fernando Labastida

There is an interesting phenomenon happening in the small and medium business segment. The widespread adoption of on-demand or software as a service (saas) CRM, led by Salesforce.com, and followed by companies such as NetSuite and RightNow Technologies.

Well, that’s not really new.

What is new is the expanded use of saas CRM software within these mini-enterprises, whether independent businesses or smaller divisions or departments of larger corporations, as their principal business platform. Since saas CRM manages the lifeblood of the business, sales and customers, and is increasingly more user friendly and flexible, it is becoming the preferred method for companies to manage their business.

As a result, it is also becoming the de facto integration hub, or SOA enabler, for the smaller enterprise.

A case in point is the experience of a well-known educational products sales company. It’s parent company sells educational toys through retailers. However, it launched a division that sells education-oriented items to schools and school districts, such as a handheld screen-based interactive tool that uses story narratives to teach English proficiency to non-native English speakers. This newer division established a territory sales model, with geographically-based sales executives selling to school districts in their area.

The main corporate entity has only a handful of account managers who sell to large retailers such as Wal-Mart and Toys’r'Us. Whereas it is geared towards a retail sales model and related B2B IT infrastructure, the newer division had the infrastructure needs of a territory-based direct sales model. They required a CRM application to track leads, opportunities, and closed sales, and because of the reduced bandwidth of this smaller business unit, they required the efficiency gains of an automated commission calculating application.

With no dedicated IT resources (IT resources are tied to corporate and are available “on-loan” to the new division), and a need to ramp-up quickly, the division chose to bring the CRM and commission calculation functionality of the on-demand model. They chose Salesforce.com and Xactly Corporation, respectively, to fulfill these functions. The one on-premise application they had access to was Oracle Financials for accounting.

The missing piece was to integrate these applications together. They chose to go with a packaged integration platform, adopting their subscription-based pricing model and on-premise software.

In addition to being the CRM platform for the new division, Salesforce.com is also serving as the de facto “enterprise service bus” to incorporate the accounting functionality of Oracle Financials, and to trigger Xactly to do it’s job of calculating sales commissions.

This use of Salesforce.com as a de facto on-demand ESB platform was noted in an August 2007 white paper entitled “Busting Myths of On-Demand Integration,” by Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research.

“On-demand platforms exhibit the growing capability to provide a foundation for integration,” he said, citing a May 2007 announcement of the Salesforce.com SOA technology that enables the exposure and consumption of web services.

In the same paragraph he notes:

“This is not to say, however, that a move to a Web services protocol strategy (such as that of using a saas application such as Salesforce.com) is a prerequisite for on-demand integration…there are options available for use with the salesforce.com platform” such as custom coding or a third party integration platform.

In other words, on-demand applications, Salesforce.com being the most prominent, are quickly establishing themselves as integration hubs the way ESB providers such as Sonic Software, IBM’s Websphere, and BEA’s Weblogic were formulated to be.

These SOA solutions, however, are cost-prohibitive for smaller companies, divisions or departments, and are often managed by enterprise IT staffs who are unresponsive to the needs of the department. These smaller enterprises have to fend for themselves, and are adopting on-demand applications that require little to no IT involvement.

IT typically has to get involved when it comes to integration, according to Coffee. Such was the case with the educational products company. Their IT department provided the input that the newer division needed to give the technical “thumbs-up” to the integration solution. But due to human bandwidth issues they decided to go with a fully delivered integration solution as opposed to the traditional toolset that is typically sold to IT departments.

Tying together Salesforce.com, Oracle Financials and Xactly Corporation was done in the span of four months and cost less than $50,000. Why did it take that long? Because they had to take a breather between deciding on an integration vendor and a commission calculation vendor.

Compare that with enterprise application integration projects which typically take nine months or more and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can see why Salesforce.com, together with fully configured integration solutions, are quickly becoming the “integration hubs” or systems of record for the smaller enterprise.

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.