Typically, a number of areas/departments of any business leverage SalesForce and integrates with other applications to achieve various process automation including Sales, Finance, Marketing and Service automation. For example, Quote to Cash, Single Customer view.

Each of these departments may have different ways of documenting their role in the conversion process and may use a different system. When these systems are not integrated with SalesForce correctly, issues, such as slow and painful handover between business units can arise and can create difficulty in understanding overall customer interaction.

Many SalesForce integration initiatives start with process integration requirements primarily to deal with scenarios where SalesForce is integrated with other applications to automate a certain business flow. It entails runtime data movement with the execution of certain business logic as well, such as validation rules, data mapping and governance policies.

But with over a period of time, some of these siloed integration processes create complexity and lack visibility. So it is important to create a data integration strategy to reduce complexity and the risk of using untrusted data in business processes.

With a trusted, accurate, and complete view of customer data, business users and applications can improve business results and operational efficiencies, which ultimately lowers cost and reduces risk.

Sometimes you may have a large amount of data that you don’t want to copy into your Salesforce org. Instead of copying the data into your SalesForce, an API enabled SalesForce integration strategy will allow accesses the data on demand and in real time. Since the data is never stale, you access only what you need.

For example if you need small amounts of real-time data at any one time. Leveraging data integration best practices-including point of entry data deduplication and address validation, standardization and consolidation-can streamline the customer acquisition process.

The ability to rapidly provide quotations and product information is critical in converting prospects to customers. Automated SalesForce integration allows salespeople to do what they do best-selling-without added administrative effort and risk of errors, particularly in pricing and invoicing.

Data integration strategy along with API driven solution is important as part of SalesForce hybrid integration. Hybrid APIs support line of business needs and accelerate digital initiatives.

It is also important to consider an access integration strategy to ensure that certain security, compliance requirements are met and right people or roles have access to the data.

An API enabled hybrid integration strategy

Empowers Line of Business (Sales, Marketing, Operation), Business partner and Employees to access complete set of customer information aggregated from multiple system

Supports single customer and data view initiatives by providing real time data from SalesForce and other cloud/on-premise systems

Builds context around APIs to allow digital interaction for customer facing systems-such as websites and call centers-and allows you to retrieve optimal personalized offers and visitor profile information in real-time to enrich the interactive customer experience.

Enables security (e.g. OAuth) and rate limiting of data for easy accessibility and capacity planning

Supports data, process and access integration patterns at the same time for SalesForce Integration

John Steward is senior analyst at Nexright. Nexright is a next generation IT services provider focused on harnessing disruptive technologies such as Cloud, Mobility, Infrastructure and Security in an integrated manner to derive disproportionate business value. Visit: http://www.nexright.com

John Steward is senior analyst at Nexright. Nexright is a next generation IT services provider focused on harnessing disruptive technologies such as Cloud, Mobility, Infrastructure and Security in an integrated manner to derive disproportionate business value. Visit: http://www.nexright.com

Author Bio: John Steward is senior analyst at Nexright. Nexright is a next generation IT services provider focused on harnessing disruptive technologies such as Cloud, Mobility, Infrastructure and Security in an integrated manner to derive disproportionate business value. Visit: http://www.nexright.com

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: cloud integration, process integration, access integration, salesforce integration