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How Salesforce Integration is used to Increase Business?

Rajat Kesarwani

By Rajat Kesarwani| Monday, May 18, 2020 12:30 PM | 4 min read

Salesforce Integration is a great way to display various applications inside Salesforce with a little modification of each app. It provides your users with an entry into multiple applications. Business needs customized integrations to manage all their business processes from within their CRM. Some of the most common CRMs are Email Synching Integration, Email Campaign Integration, Marketing Automation Integration, and Accounting Integration. Integrating Salesforce with other business applications is important to manage all the customers, partners, and prospects in real-time.

Integrations with Salesforce CRM ensure all of the data is synchronized, providing you with a real-time view of the customers and business processes. It enables the team to be more effective when it comes to managing data as the need to go back and forth between systems for data gets eliminated. Salesforce integrations ensure that you have all your data automatically organized in one central location, be it the e-commerce platform you are using or a marketing automation tool. It is beneficial since having access to the correct information at the right time that can help you get more work done and get more deals.

The first step towards a successful Salesforce Integration is to understand the business needs and requirements. The Salesforce developers take this step seriously and conduct a process analysis with your team to understand your business requirements. After understanding your business needs and requirements, the next step involves modification to your instance to set it up for successful integration. This involves building new dashboards, objects, or fields. The next most crucial step is modifying your data for integration. The bi-directional flow of data between your Salesforce instance and third-party integration needs to be modified to ensure stability.

Salesforce is an early pioneer of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) and it's popular CRM products are used to manage and facilitate sales, support services, and other customer interactions. Valuable enterprise data quickly builds up in a “cloud silo” which is a computer server with one application and it is not designed to interact with other applications.

For Salesforce’s products to truly add value to the business, the integration process is necessary. With the increase in the shift of the hybrid architectures means that integration solutions must connect Salesforce.com with other SaaS applications and on-premises legacy systems.

Custom CodingWhen SaaS applications became popular, application integration was treated as an afterthought. With the availability of the SaaS integration tools, many enterprises adopted the custom hand coding practice by in-house IT teams to connect Salesforce.com with legacy applications and systems.
The benefits of such a DIY approach is that integrations are tailored to specific use cases, with developers writing customized connectors using the Salesforce.com API.

Hand coding has some disadvantages:

Time-consuming and costly – in-house developers spend a lot of time writing custom code for a Salesforce.com integration project. This means that other IT projects receive less attention and budgets can be extremely high, especially if external services are involved.

Technical expertise is required – Hand-coded integrations require special skills that’s why business analysts must rely on developers to build integrations from scratch to successfully align IT systems without business processes. Coding errors and some maintenance also involves the highly skilled IT professionals, slowing down deployment times.

It doesn’t scale well – Hand-coding might make sense for simple architectures where only two or three systems need to be integrated, but such architectures will likely to grow and evolve as business needs change. The procurement of a new system or SaaS application means more hand-coding is involved to connect each of these additions to Salesforce.com. In the long run, this is unsustainable for the growth of the business.

It contributes to system volatility – Maintenance and upgrades for SaaS applications are typically handled by the service provider, hand-coded integrations may stop running properly when new versions of Salesforce.com are rolled out. Due to this, system errors, disrupting mission-critical business activities can occur.

Integrating with tools from Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com provides the integration solutions from third-party integration providers to a cloud-based application Platform as Service (aPaaS) called Force.com. These tools seem like an alternative to hand-coding. With the help of AppExchange, Salesforce.com offers many pre-built integrations and applications from partner companies. These solutions can reduce the amount of time and financial resources needed for hand coding, but it can be difficult to modify and customize depending upon its nature and lack of visibility and monitoring capabilities.

The Force.com platform allows developers to create new applications and integrate Salesforce.com with existing ones using the platform’s APIs. Force.com is an aPaaS towards developing new applications, which means that integration is a capability but not the main use of the platform. With the help of the platform, it is easy to customize Salesforce.com applications for the existing users, and it limits users from using it freely across different systems and platforms.

CloudHub: Integration for the cloud era

The limitations of existing SaaS integration tools have paved the way for CloudHub, a cloud-based integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), to emerge as the go-to integration solution for the cloud era. CloudHub makes it easy to integrate with Salesforce.com through configuration – not coding – in addition to other SaaS offerings, cloud services, social media platforms, and on-premises applications.

Rajat Kesarwani
About the Author Rajat Kesarwani is the CEO of Dreamstel Technologies. With over 15 years of experience in maintaining business relations with esteemed companies across the US and Australia, Mr. Kesarwani has earned an excellent reputation in the IT industry. He has been offering advanced technology services to businesses that require any kind of IT solution. His expert services at Dreamstel includes developing and introducing next-generation apps and spreading awareness about Salesforce. His objective is to reach out to companies in need of advanced technology solutions, and he has been successfully moving ahead in the right direction to do so, through Dreamstel Technologies.