Informatica Perspectives

Our third stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘across the pond’ in London England.  Salesforce saw an early opportunity to expand the footprint (or should I saw ‘cloud print’) of their leading SaaS CRM system beyond the US and so we found a strong following and interest there.  While primarily a UK audience, the event drew enterprise users from across Europe as well as many budding startups and systems integrators looking to build cloud-based applications on the force.com platform.

We again sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our local UK customer sportingbet presented a case study describing how they have significantly improved their overall marketing automation efforts by integrating their operational platform with their Salesforce CRM and Eloqua marketing automation systems.  Linking the three platforms together enabled them to leverage information on their customers’ service usage and behavior to more effectively target marketing programs and promotions to sustain and increase their overall business.  Essentially achieving every marketers dream (including the author’s).

Sportingbet.com is a major brand in the online retail gaming sector providing a wide range of products including online sports, casino, poker and virtual games across Europe, Australia and the Emerging Markets.  With over 2,000,000 customers serviced by 27 separate web-sites in different languages and currencies, sportingbet had a major challenge in dealing with data integration and data conversion.  Additionally the Marketing group was looking to improve returning subscriber traffic to their sites through automated email marketing programs to sustain and grow customer usage.  The challenge was that over 200 terabytes of subscriber usage information was locked up in an on premise data warehouse.  And to complicate things further, the data is in a multitude of languages and currency formats.   And to maintain an extremely high level of data security sportingbet employs two separate firewall ‘rings’, presenting a further challenge to integrating their on premise (the operational systems) and cloud computing applications (Salesforce CRM and Eloqua).

Working with the local Fujitsu Consulting office, they went looking for a way to integrate the data between their operational systems and their Salesforce CRM and Eloqua Marketing Automation platforms.  Fujitsu recommended and selected the Informatica On Demand Data Synchronization Service to accomplish the import and synchronization tasks.  The Informatica architecture was ideally suited to support their security needs and the SQL database connectors helped to simplify the systems integration process by eliminating the need for additional custom database coding.

Integrating daily, weekly and monthly subscriber usage data from the data warehouse into Salesforce, the Eloqua system is then able to send timely, relevant email marketing campaigns to active sportingbet subscribers to encourage return visits to the sportingbet portals.  Streamlining the extract and upload processes using the automated scheduling feature built into the Data Synchronization Service meant that the integration jobs run automatically eliminating the need for manual intervention.  The powerful data transformation features provided through the web-based mapping and expression editor enables transformation of data between the various systems to assure language and currency accuracy.

The sportingbet Marketing team now has timely, accurate subscriber activity information available within Salesforce and to their Eloqua system.  With this tightly integrated solution they are able to spot trends and changes in behavior at the macro and the subscriber level to improve business efficiencies without needing to hire additional staff or invest in costly on-premise equipment and software.

You’ll find a brief overview of the sportingbet case study on the Informatica On Demand website.

And if you’re interested in learning more about the Informatica architecture and the process of working with firewalls and cloud-based applications, you’ll find an informative white paper on the topic on the Informatica On Demand website.

Next stop on the tour is Chicago.  Please check back to learn how a leading financial services information provider is leveraging  both on premise and on demand data integration solutions to improve their Sales efforts.