Our fifth and final stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was Minneapolis. This was our first visit to this mid-West business hub and we were very interested to see what types of businesses were looking at Cloud Computing and how they saw the challenges of integrating their operational systems with the new cloud-based world. We were both surprised and overwhelmed by the attendance and the response. You might have thought we were in the ‘show me’ state by the interest in our On Demand data integration demonstrations.
We held a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast for a ‘standing room only’ crowd prior to the start of the day-long Cloudforce conference. Our local customer, Andersen Windows and Doors presented an engaging case study describing a Master Data Management Hub architecture that they implemented to tie their operational systems into their Salesforce CRM system. As with the case study presented at our last Cloudforce Roundtable, Andersen employed a combination of Informatica On Premise and On Demand solutions to bring their various operational and customer case data together to integrate into Salesforce CRM as well as to replicate Salesforce data to their centralized BI reporting system. Their ultimate goal was to assure timely, accurate customer data across the organization to improve customer relationships and operational efficiencies.
Andersen is a privately owned business, founded in 1903 by Danish immigrants who milled logs that arrived at the Andersen plant via the St. Croix River. Today, Andersen Corporation is an international enterprise employing over 11,000 people at more than 20 locations with headquarters in Bayport, Minnesota, a 2.8 million-square-foot facility that covers 65 acres. Andersen annually manufactures more than six million wood windows and doors, with sales worldwide. That’s a lot of inventory to keep track of and a lot of customers to manage relationships with.
Andersen has a collection of operational systems based on Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server along with departmental file systems and data. They have over 350 Salesforce users across their operational and customer care groups who all need access to current, accurate customer data. A lead Software Engineer in the Andersen’s IT group, had worked with Informatica PowerCenter in their data center and was looking for a solution to connect their core Master Data Management Hub with their Salesforce CRM system. Equally important to getting product and operational data into Salesforce, was the need to get data out of Salesforce to include in their on premise BI and reporting system. Ultimately they selected the Informatica On Demand Data Replication and Data Synchronization Services to meet the need. After registering for a free trial [link to trial registration on iod.com/app] they were able to quickly begin using the services to import and export data to and from the data hub and their Salesforce CRM system. Coupling the power of the Informatica Data Integration Platform to manage the Data Hub and the flexibility of the web-based On Demand Data Replication and Data Synchronization Services the Andersen IT team was able to deliver a comprehensive solution that addressed everyone’s needs. You might think of it as providing everyone with a ‘window’ into their customer and product information.
You’ll find a brief overview of the Andersen case study on the Informatica On Demand website.
If you’d like to read more about leveraging both on premise and on demand data integration services you’ll find an informative white paper on the topic on the Informatica On Demand website.
The Minneapolis event was the final city we attended on the Spring ’09 Cloudforce Tour. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the recaps and case studies that were presented along the way. I’ll continue to write on this blog about various data integration tool use cases as we continue to explore and expand our integration solutions for Cloud Computing.
