As the head of marketing for the Informatica On Demand Business unit focused on meeting the Data Integration needs of the SaaS and Cloud Computing markets, I’m keenly aware of how critical it is to ‘know your customer’, especially in a relatively new and dynamic market like SaaS and Cloud Computing.

A variety of methods exist for marketers to engage with prospects, but there’s no substitution for 1:1 face-to-face interactions to hold in-depth discussions related to their needs and challenges as their businesses react and respond to the turmoil of the economy we all find ourselves in.

While the tradeshow industry is reeling from a loss of attendance due to travel restrictions and budget cuts, we have discovered to our good fortune that the salesforce.com Cloudforce ‘Success Tours’ has seen the opposite, a solid stream of regional attendees who come to hear the latest news from Salesforce.com and their strategic partners. The conferences are free, are only 1 day long, and are held in major metropolitan areas around the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Informatica is a strategic partner with salesforce.com and participation in these regional events has proven to be an extremely valuable method for us to ‘know our customer’.

Over the past few months and on into the foreseeable future, Informatica On Demand will attend dozens of these regional events meeting 1:1 with thousands of prospective customers and partners to hear first hand their challenges and needs as they integrate the data between their salesforce.com CRM systems and force.com applications with the rest of their business. I’ll start off with a few high level observations here and then over the coming weeks report on what we learn as we attend the saleforce.com Cloudforce Tour events.

My first observation is that there are a lot of misconceptions related to the current state of Data Integration tools amongst people working in both the business groups that own and manage CRM, and surprisingly even IT. It is not uncommon to hear from the business users and Salesforce Administrators, “data integration is hard” or “it’s only for IT”, or “it takes a lot of really skilled people”. Or the IT people lament that “there’s never enough time” to meet the ever mounting list of projects that the line of business groups come up with.

Those same business people will describe how their CRM system is an island of information and that they’re spending hours each week manually manipulating and importing sales leads, manually updating accounts and contact records, manually exporting orders and opportunity data and manually transferring information from their business databases and systems with Salesforce CRM.

With the doubts and misconceptions I just described, the reaction to the Informatica On Demand Data Integration Services continues to be very positive and sometimes overwhelming. The same people who had just said, “its too hard” changed tack and stated “I can do that” after watching a quick 2-minute demonstration of the Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service. And the same IT people who had said they didn’t have enough time to address even the basic requests of the Salesforce Administrators, saw these new tools as a solution to the IT bottleneck. Setting up automated Salesforce data integration jobs can free up valuable time to work on other critical projects.

If you’re interested in hearing first hand reactions from some of our customers you’ll find video interviews on our website.

As additional background, my colleague Ron Papas recently blogged on the topic of Salesforce Integration and highlighted various options and architectural approaches to integrating Salesforce data through the firewall. And we just released a new white paper on Salesforce Integration that you may find useful in getting a more in-depth look at your options.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging ‘from the road’ as we meet with customers and prospects gaining further insight into their challenges and their successes as they continue to expand their use of SaaS and Cloud Computing.

You’ll find a schedule of upcoming Cloudforce events on the InformaticaOnDemand.com website and I encourage you to attend one to learn for yourself. And I hope you’ll check back periodically to join me on our journey.