Informatica Perspectives

Our second stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was New York City.  The impact of the economic downturn was clearly apparent in both the business and social conversations we had with Tour attendees.  But like the Cloudforce Tour event in Atlanta, the New York audience was very focused on SaaS and Cloud Computing and came prepared to learn what was new from salesforce.com and their partners, including Informatica On Demand.  While most were looking for ways to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies, an equal number were interested in finding innovative ways to deliver new services in the cloud.  As the Financial Services industry has been on the forefront of application development, these seasoned professionals were interested in learning how they could integrate new cloud-based applications with the back office systems and databases of their firms and their clients.  After all a cloud without integration is really just a cloud adrift.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer comScore presented a case study on how they are integrating and synchronizing their Salesforce CRM system data with an on premise database for operational analytics and reporting.  Their approach enables them to bring business analytics to their Sales and Marketing teams by integrating their on premise and cloud-based CRM systems while improving operational efficiency.

comScore is a global leader in monitoring and measuring the digital world and their insight enables their customers to better understand and leverage the evolving worldwide web and mobile markets.   To better market these information services to the advertising agencies, publishers, marketers and financial analysts that make up their customers, comScore needed to get current data on customer and business activities out of their Salesforce CRM system and into their on premise analytics and reporting systems.   Once they ‘crunched the numbers’ they needed to quickly get the results back into Salesforce to enable their Sales and Marketing teams to better identify business opportunities with existing and prospective clients.

The Financial Analyst team at comScore, previously used a number of separate tools to manually isolate and extract data from Salesforce account records and then manually load the data into complex Excel spreadsheet models where the data was then manually analyzed and manipulated.  Often times a particular opportunity or business situation might require a different cut of the data, necessitating further manual effort, often taking valuable resources and hours of work.  The extract, analysis and upload processes were manual, labor intensive, time consuming and somewhat error prone.  Scaling the business would require additional resources and increased overhead, neither desirable in today’s economy.

Farokh Bayegan, Sr. Director Financial Systems at comScore, found the Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization and Data Replication Services on AppExchange [link to DSS listing on AppEx] as he researched alternatives to their existing manual program.  He crafted a new architectural approach that replaced the Excel models with a Microsoft SQL database.  The SQL database connectors provided with the Informatica Services eliminated the need for additional custom database coding.  After registering for a free trial [link to App reg page] Farokh was able to integrate SQL Server with Salesforce to validate the new approach all without requiring consulting or IT resources.

The key to streamlining the extract and upload processes was the automated scheduling feature built into both the Data Synchronization and Data Replication Services.  Farokh was able to set the integration jobs to run automatically so no manual effort was required to replicate the Salesforce data to MS SQL and to upload the resulting analysis back to Salesforce.

The comScore Sales team now has current, accurate information at their fingertips within their Salesforce Account records.  With this automated analytics process they are able to see trends and changes in business with specific customers, enabling the reps to spot opportunities, or to provide additional products.  The Financial Analysis team is now able to provide more timely and accurate analytics without needing to hire additional staff or invest in costly on-premise equipment and software.

You’ll find a brief overview of the comScore case study on the InformaticaOnDemand.com website.

In case you’re interested in attending a future Cloudforce conference you’ll find a schedule of upcoming Cloudforce events on the InformaticaOnDemand.com website.  I encourage you to attend one to learn for yourself.

Next stop on the tour is London.  Please check back to read about an innovative approach one of our customers has taken to improve their marketing automation to more effectively reach and engage with their customers.