On-demand applications are still seen as difficult to integrate.
Integration between different applications essentially requires a good understanding of ‘source’ and ‘target’ applications, as well as any technology layers that may be in the middle, such as enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, and application programming interfaces (APIs). The challenge is to make sure that applications are integrated together to avoid issues such as duplication of data entry into more than one system, or to ensure that a more complete picture of an entity is available than might be stored within the on-demand application.
One of Salesforce.com’s customers, for example, has integrated its SAP system (which is still regarded as the master data repository for the company) with Salesforce.com. The customer, a semiconductor company with 60,000 of its own customers, needed both customer and product data to be available via the ‘front office’ Salesforce automation system, where new leads can be added (and kept separate from existing customers).
RightNow CRM can also be integrated, and it too uses a web services-based integration method, and has an XML API. It can therefore be integrated to many web services-compliant platforms including Java, .NET, and Perl, allowing integration to occur at the application layer (i.e. via API) rather than at the database layer.
The biggest issue with on-demand applications is if you need to integrate them with much older technology, and may therefore need to spend time and money on how to integrate those with today’s web services-based applications. However, many of the more recent integration tools, for example the enterprise service bus (ESB), can still facilitate the integration of old and new applications via the web services paradigm.
The one point that still needs to be made is that the problem of integration will not go away in an on-demand world.
Source: Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
