Connecting The Customer Success Platform

Dreamforce 15: Connecting The Customer Success Platform

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.

(more…)

The Programmable Enterprise

The Programmable Enterprise

Salesforce continues to grow at a 30% rate year-over-year. As a result, our data silos continue to increase across the company. This is especially true when companies are acquired and incorporated into the overall Salesforce ecosystem. In order to continue to support a $20B dollar company by the year 2020, our internal data integration infrastructure and architecture will need to be modernized to support the volume of business needs while curbing operating expenses. Our vision is to connect the business to data that they can trust, when and where they need it, so that the enterprise can continue to scale and innovate. This document describe in detail how this will be achieved.

(more…)

Why Point-to-Point Integrations Are Evil

p2p-integrations

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.

(more…)

Data Integration Technology Selection Considerations

integration-technology-selection

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.

(more…)

The Self-Service Data Delivery Integration Platform for Next Generation Companies

data-delivery-strategy-banner
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.

(more…)

Why IT Budgets Promote Point-to-Point Integrations

why-soa-fails
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.

(more…)

How To Make Salesforce Dashboards A Reality With Your Key Users

dashboards
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.

(more…)