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). [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]

If you’re in the market for a SaaS integration tool, then you’ve probably come across one or more of the following marketing messages: "Integrate in days", "Designed for non-programmers”, "Configuration, not coding approach"… which, of course, are all messages associated with one of the main value propositions of Software-as-a-Service: Ease of use and rapid deployment.

The notion of an integration tool that has a graphical user interface, is configuration based (metadata driven), easy to maintain, and requires no programming skills is not new. Those of you who were involved with DataMart projects in the mid to late 90’s may still remember Informatica’s PowerMart 3.0 product which was the predecessor to our current PowerCenter product.

It had all those characteristics, and was quite revolutionary at the time. Its target audience was data analysts or a data warehousing administrator who had a good understanding of their organization’s data structures and business processes, but didn’t have the deep programming skills of an IT specialist. [Read more]

If you work for an ISV or a SaaS provider, there is a good chance you or members of your team have spent countless hours and precious resources hand-coding solutions to your data integration challenges. If you haven’t, great! If you have, you have a chance to save money and resources while gaining a competitive advantage by leveraging Informatica for your data integration needs.

As noted in the October 20th InformationWeek cover entitled, "SaaS Under Stress"; Integration is the next big test for software as a service. By ensuring data integration is an integral part of your application and architecture, you can alleviate stress.

We’ve recently published a comprehensive whitepaper called, Solving Cloud Data Integration: A Key Challenge for SaaS Providers that outlines the key requirements and challenges facing ISV and SaaS providers in delivering a complete solution to market. It also covers how Informatica’s data integration platform and On Demand integration offerings can help. Take a look, I think you’ll find it worth your time.

People have begun to realize that integration is a key requirement for a successful SaaS application deployment.  Since a SaaS application like Salesforce CRM resides in the cloud (it is hosted in a data center outside your company's firewalls), customers need to move their critical corporate data like customer, product or pricing information into Salesforce before they can use the application and provide maximum value to their end users.

They also need to keep the data in Salesforce synchronized with the rest of their on premise applications in order to maintain operational efficiency and provide timely and accurate information flow throughout their enterprise.

So how difficult is it to integrate Salesforce with on premise applications, and how should it be done?  Well, for starters, salesforce.com provides a complete set of well documented APIs that make it straight forward for a good software programmer to accomplish that task.

Those same APIs are also used by integration vendors to provide more flexible, powerful and manageable solutions that accomplish the same task without requiring the same level of programming skill.   [Read more]

Web 2.0 - the constellation of technologies and methodologies that cover everything from collaboration to clouds to mashups - has been the darling of the consumer Web for several years now. With a few keystrokes, users can tap into huge global communities, mine rich veins of online data, and assemble their own lightweight applications.

While all this excitement has whirled around the consumer Web, the impact on enterprises - and how enterprise architects should view Web 2.0 - has not been clear. Until now. [Read more]

It was with great pleasure that I was told yesterday our latest cloud service (the Informatica On-Demand Data loader) was crowned "Best Integration tool" for salesforce.com. This is particularly appealing since it is voted for by salesforce.com users.

Our goal is to help users integrate data - wherever it is.  As cloud computing takes off, users are faced with an increasing dilemma - how to control this further fragmentation of data.  Over the last few years we have pioneered the ability to not only connect to the clouds, but also to deliver a service in the clouds.  This is why this accolade is so gratifying to us all at Informatica.

One of the really cool things that salesforce.com does is allow users to post comments about the salesforce.com applications community - and our Data Loader Service is just one of those.

Take a look at some of the actual comments from the user community about our solution:

• "I found that this tool was easy to understand, simple to set up and I feel that this is of great value to our organization".
• "We researched a few data integration tools that we thought would work within our corporate environment. Nothing beat the value that Informatica brings to the table".
• "After having trialed SalesForce's own data loader I have got to say that Informatica's on demand data loader was a refreshing turn of direction".
• "This tool couldn't be simpler to use. If you are looking for an easy way to copy all of your salesforce data once or on a regularly scheduled interval into a Local Database, this is the tool for you".
• "After looking and testing several products Informatica On Demand Data Loader Service for Salesforce was by far the easiest product to implement into are salesforce enviroment".

You can find all these reviews and more on the Salesforce.com Appexchange here.  Why don't you test out the On Demand Data Loader Service for yourself for free and see just how easy it is. Go on, try it - you know you want to

Have you noticed how many of the important new initiatives over the past year revolve around data and information? We've been seeing a greater impetus to measures such as master data management, service oriented architecture, data integration, business process management, the rise of open source data warehouses and BI, the rise of data warehouse appliances, and the blooming of the cloud computing revolution. On top of all this has been heightened concern - and action - over data security.

Not only is PowerCenter Informatica's flagship product line, it's also an appropriate description for what's become of the data management function in recent times. [Read more]