This year I had the privilege to present at Dreamforce ’15 on how we’re tackling enterprise data and integrations at Salesforce.com. This is a business operations topic where many companies are struggling to make sense in an ever-shifting and growing landscape of data, technologies and software architectures. Each organization is different in how they try to solve this complex problem. This presentation showcases how we at Salesforce.com approached data integration in a high growth, fast paced technology company.
Why Point-to-Point Integrations Are Evil
Salesforce has been growing at 30% year over year. In order to grow at this rate while supporting the business, IT has had to make compromises. Many of these compromises have been to defer infrastructure and architectural investments to a later date. Unfortunately, over time, IT will become the bottleneck or worse, the blocker for the company to deliver services to our customers. The diagram below depicts a representation of the current state of the P2P integrations within Salesforce. Unfortunately, at the time of the post, this is the internal infrastructure that the company relies on to run a multi-billion dollar a year business.
Data Integration Technology Selection Considerations
The purpose of this document is to help guide and inform IT project teams to the correct integration platform for projects. Note that this is only a guide, as there can be multiple options based on the integration activities. Use the matrix in this document in conjunction with input from the Enterprise Architecture Review Board (EARB) to select the appropriate technology.
The Self-Service Data Delivery Integration Platform for Next Generation Companies
Not long ago I presented at the MuleSoft TopMule Meetup ’14 in San Diego, CA, on an initiative I’m running at salesforce.com called Free The Data: Transforming The Way The Business Connects To Data. With approximately 400 MuleSoft employees in attendance, MuleSoft has doubled its size in just one year. It’s a testament to the industry demand for their integration and API solutions. My talk centered around how we are aggregating, exposing and simplifying access to internal enterprise data.
I Love APIs 2014 Conference Notes
Last week Apigee held their I Love APIs 2014 (#ILoveAPIs) conference in San Francisco at Fort Mason. These are some of my take-away’s and general thoughts of the conference for the one and a half days that I attended.
API Days 2014 Conference Notes
Today I attended the morning session keynotes for API Days (#ApiDaysSF) here in San Francisco. The theme of the conference was Disrupting the Car Industry and Driver Experience with APIs. Of the 25 speakers, I attended the keynotes from Larry Burns, Kin Lane, Sid Bhatia, and Nick Muerdter.
Informatica World 2014 Conference Notes
Last week Informatica held their Informatica World 2014 (#INFA14) conference in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. These are some of my take-away’s and general thoughts of the conference for the few day’s that I attended.
Why IT Budgets Promote Point-to-Point Integrations
Today many IT departments have a hybrid of legacy on-premise applications and newer, more innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business applications that they need to manage. Salesforce.com is no different; we have a lot of SaaS and on-premise applications that we use to run our daily operations. Our Enterprise Application Integration program has a number of use cases that we support, but can be consolidated into two main concentration areas: 1) System-to-System Data Exchange, and 2) API Data Access.
How To Make Salesforce Dashboards A Reality With Your Key Users
A dashboard is a collection of components that graphically displays your custom report data and gives you a snapshot of key metrics and performance indicators. Dashboards allow users to consume large amounts of information in a simple, easy to understand, graphical view. Research has shown that our brain can interpret graphical representations of data, such as graphs and charts, much more easily than large rows and columns of data.