Vets Win Talent War With SOA

Hire A Hero is a small firm with a big mission: helping military personnel transition to civilian life by connecting them with potential employers using Web 2.0 social networking tools. After some fits and starts, it found that a solution built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) enabled it to achieve its goals at a low cost. What's more, because of its nonprofit status, some vendors donated the services for free.

When Hire A Hero started, it had visions of building its own system. But Executive Director Brac Selph knew that if his company were to survive, it needed a new plan that involved working with existing services. So he cobbled together a solution that involved two software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors and a data integration tool to act as a bridge between the two systems.

The first piece was Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management tool built on the SaaS model. Hire A Hero was already using Salesforce to organize information about employees and potential employers. Salesforce helped automate many processes by building in business logic normally used for a sales channel. So if members didn't send a resume, they got an automatic reminder e-mail message. Salesforce donated the service.

The next piece was a front-end Web tool to enable employers and employees to enter information about themselves into the system and provide social networking functionality. Selph found an SaaS vendor called YourMembership.com, whose tool provided 80 percent of the functionality he wanted for just $500 a month. It also let him eliminate technical staff, saving $200,000 a year.

The final piece: finding a data integrator to help get data from YourMembership into Salesforce. Selph began exploring the Salesforce AppExchange for a solution. XAware offered an open-source solution that would work; XAware would provide it for free.

Hire A Hero was now ready to begin automating the data transfer. But there was a problem: YourMembership lacked an open API, and that meant XAware couldn't communicate directly with it to grab data. The solution involved generating a report manually. Despite this, Selph says it still greatly simplified the data transfer and reduced the likelihood of an error during the exchange. Even without the API, there was just a single file to deal with; the XAware tool took care of field mapping, new field creation and duplicate records purging.

Selph advises organizations with similar projects to look beyond the surface of what a company does. Salesforce is a CRM vendor; YourMembership is used by alumni groups. "Be creative because the [SaaS vendor] may market themselves as one thing, but they could fit your needs as well."