CRM's Integration Blues
On-demand applications like Salesforce.com have many advantages, but can they integrate easily with your other core apps? Results still vary.
Integration limits in an on-demand CRM app can truly hinder your options. Research firm Common Sense Advisory found this out the hard way: It licensed Salesforce.com's professional edition and later wanted to integrate it with Constant Contact, QuickBooks and MySQL. "We called customer support about the API, which, it turns out, is available only with the Enterprise or Unlimited (Salesforce.com) editions," says Don DePalma, president of the firm. And those editions cost $1,500 to $2,400 per user per year, compared to the roughly $700 that Common Sense had been paying. He ended up dropping Salesforce.com.
On the other hand, where SaaS applications are accessible via their own APIs, the fact that SaaS applications are unchangeable benefits IT, notes EFI's Do. It's harder to do in-house hacks that later complicate maintenance, upgrades and support. "SaaS forces you to be disciplined; you have to use the APIs to do your integration," he says.
Dan Tabori, executive VP of business operations at Prudential Locations in Hawaii, has taken advantage of the APIs in NetSuite CRM to integrate it with his real estate brokerage's financial systems and customer Web portal. "Three years ago, we realized we needed to centralize all client data, not just property data," says Tabori, whose duties include the CIO role. Tabori wanted more than a contact manager; he wanted a portal that agents could use for managing both their clients and transactions.
The firm uses Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions' DPN software for the financial transactions, and a homegrown Web portal to help clients search for homes. To make all three applications work together, Tabori's IT staff uses NetSuite's APIs to invoke tasks within the CRM software, such as sending an e-mail survey to a customer once a transaction has occurred in DPN. He also uses the APIs to request tasks of other applications, such as registering a new client within the Web portal. For the other two applications, Prudential Locations uses a combination of Web services and JavaScripts to access particular functions.
Web Services Prove Key
Most CIOs who deploy on-demand CRM should expect to use Web services as the primary integration mechanism across applications. Unlike the situation about three years ago, Web services APIs are now common in current versions of both traditional and on-demand applications. Web services⬠based APIs provide a common framework for accessing various applications' capabilities, which makes integration easier for IT developers. The use of Web services also discourages the use of custom code that requires ongoing maintenance once deployed. But not all functions are exposed as Web services, so it can be harder, or even impossible, to integrate with some functions in your legacy applications.
