Informatica Perspectives

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. [Read more]

Our fourth stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour was ‘the windy city’ of Chicago (and yes it was very windy that week). Situated in the middle of the country the Greater Chicago Area is headquarters for a diverse set of companies from large manufacturing and financial services firms to mid-sized business services organizations. The common thread seems to be that regardless of size or industry everyone is looking to reduce costs, streamline operations and improve overall operational efficiencies. SaaS applications and Cloud Computing are ideally suited to meet those objectives.

Our fourth CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast was held in conjunction with the Cloudforce conference. Attendees were treated to a case study presentation by our local customer, TransUnion who described their efforts to improve Call Center efficiencies by integrating various ‘systems of record’ to provide a true 360 degree view of the customer to their call center reps. Initially integrating five separate data sources from IBM and Oracle-based applications, enabled the call center group to increase ‘first call’ resolution rates by over 200 percent while significantly reducing incoming call times. [Read more]

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). [Read more]

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. [Read more]

For those of you following along from my last blog post, first stop on the Spring ’09 salesforce.com Cloudforce Tour is Atlanta, GA.  It’s interesting to see the difference a year makes in the attitude and awareness of the people attending.  Last year Informatica On Demand sponsored the Salesforce.com conference, then called Tour de Force.

While the ’08 audience was curious, they seemed more interested in socializing with their fellow attendees and colleagues.  This year the tone was much more business focused and attendance was up nearly 50% over ’08.  SaaS and Cloud Computing are now top of mind for businesses looking to reduce and manage costs, and integration of back office systems and databases with Salesforce CRM is a pressing topic for all who we spoke with.

We sponsored a CRM Integration Roundtable breakfast with local prospects, and our customer Atlanta Dental Supply (ADS) presented a case study on how they’ve integrated their Salesforce CRM system with their MS SQL Server-based order management system.  It’s an interesting example of how a relatively straight forward ‘out of the box’ (or should I say ‘out of the cloud’) integration can significantly streamline sales and operations for a rapidly growing mid-size business. [Read more]

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’. [Read more]