Live blog: De-mystifying integration: making the complex simple

Darren Smith from Salesforce kicks off. Integration is hard, but a reality. A lot of people have to integrate, and presenting data to different systems you are running is hugely important.

Salesforce provides five major areas for integration: connectors, developer toolkits, mashups (s-controls), integration with productivity tools (Google Apps).

Web services api is one of the reasons for integration being successful in salesforce. This is key. Use and adoption of the api is huge, and increasing. 55% of traffic is API use.

The connectors, e.g. for SAP allow you to map between salesforce and SAP. The data loader uses the web services API also. The concept of the external ID (a candidate key in db lingo) allows you to map easily. ETL tooling from partners allows you to integrate more easily with native connectivity.

If you an EE or above user you can expose your apex code as a web service.

Coming soon is async apex code for messaging - low on details, but sounds like a messaging service?

Trying to move beyond Google Maps mashups!

Ami Gal takes the stage. Magic is a multi-national company. They have to connect with many different CRM, and integration was difficult. They wanted an online picture of their company, and not having to beg people for reports and paperwork. Reporting is very important to them as they are NASDAQ listed. They realised they had to integrate salesforce with core aplications - SAP for accounting, web shop, customer support, licensing.

How did they do it? They tried the exercise 3 years ago with a different CRM spending $600k, and failed. So they decided to build their own technology - iBOLT.

What did they achieve? $160k a year savings. Enhanced customer service. Before they waited for 3 or 4 departments to process them. Business agility, easier to respond to market needs on a market by market basis. Cross-sell and up-sell. Eliminate errors - data quality. Real time monitoring.

To deliver one person worked for four days. It took five days to agree the process between the departments.

Response time after purchase dropped down from 24 hours to 5 minutes.

iBOLT allows you to build a graphical workflow of integration between multiple sources, e.g. Exchange, Lotus Notes, Google Apps, salesforce, ... Seems very slick, athough only saw a screenshot.

Data synchronisation is only the first step. You want to be able to free people's time up and streamline as much as possible. Now commissions for salespeople are on time, customers renew their own licenses, sales cost less and less. Forecasts are better, and you have a better understanding of customer buying habits.

Integration is not a pain, but an opportunity. Don't try to reinvent the wheel and write custom code. It takes too long and is too risky. SoA ensures agility.

Now onto Vik Gupta from Google Enterprise. Bit of talk about how easy it was for Google and Salesforce to integrate.

For Google it's all about getting apps into the cloud and making it easy for people to do so. How? The key is APIs. They started off with the LDAP sync tools, and then moved onto SAML for SSO. Then it was a matter of taking on a whole migration suite. At the moment there is an IMAP migration tool. IMAP has many quirks though, too difficult for them to support. GData API now allows you to create integration or migration tools.

Small bit of chat about gadgets, and their portability. GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is touched on briefly, as well as Google Gears.

Appirio get a mention here, and the Campaign Timelines product in particular.

Google Solutions Marketplace gets a plug too - Google's Appexchange basically.