Data Integration Blog

Apatar has recently launched Apatar On-Demand for Salesforce.com CRM and QuickBooks accounting software. Apatar On-Demand Edition is a hosted service that synchronizes order data between Salesforce.com CRM and desktop QuickBooks accounting software. It was designed for business users, so the process of setting up the integration link does not require technical skills. Apatar On-Demand Edition for Salesforce.com and QuickBooks allows running one- or two-way, recurring or one-time synchronization of account, contact, order, and opportunity data, while preserving links between tables in both Salesforce.com and QuickBooks.Designed specifically to avoid double entry, subscription to Apatar software also includes embedded data quality service. To free its users from manual data upkeep, Apatar software searches and removes duplicate accounts every time it synchronizes order data.

Apatar On-Demand is available on AppExchange

Why Salesforce.com and QuickBooks users should care?

According to Forrester Research, 66% of North American and European enterprises are afraid to adopt SaaS applications due to integration issues. Apatar On-Demand solves this problem by providing easy-to-use integration and synchronization of data between Web-based and desktop applications. A recent survey by Kelton Research confirms the enterprise’s increasing interest in on-demand services, with nearly 73 percent of large companies saying they had adopted or plan to adopt SaaS in the next 18 months.

Features and benefits: * Accelerate billing
* Shorten collection cycles
* Eliminate duplicate order data
* Avoid double entry and manual coding
* Quickly process new and existing customer sales orders
* Arm your sales and customer service representatives with key information, including customer sales history and up-to-date product data
* As easy as synchronizing your BlackBerry!

Supported QuickBooks editions include QuickBooks Pro, Premier, Enterprise 2003, and, later, QuickBooks 2007.

More details here.

Renat Khasanshyn, the founder and CEO of Apatar, will speak on the future of enterprise data mashups at Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World 2008 conference, the independent event dedicated to software architecture, design, modeling, and UML. The event will be held on July 21-24, 2008 at the Hyatt McCormick Place, Chicago, IL, and include 75 focused sessions on real-world topics, visionary keynotes, in-depth training, and networking with peers, industry leaders, and world-class speakers.

In his presentation, Renat Khasanshyn, the founder of the Apatar Open Source Data Integration project, will explore how enterprise architects, developers, and business users can leverage existing mashup technologies to build and deploy data mashups. The session will focus on tips and best practices and also highlight the major challenges preventing mashup design tools from being implemented across the enterprise sector. Finally, Mr. Khasanshyn will walk the audience through the process of building “Cold Call Assistant for Salesforce.com,” the mashup that won the 2007 IBM Business Mashup Challenge.

Session information: what, where, when
“Enterprise 2.0 and Data Mashups: Bridging the Information Gap”
Renat Khasanshyn, founder and CEO of Apatar, Inc.
July 24, 2008, 1:30–3:00 p.m.
Track: Service-Oriented Architecture
Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, 2233 S. Martin L. King Drive, Chicago, IL
Audience Level: Intermediate

https://www.cmpevents.com/SDUM8/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=575532

Visit http://drdobbsarchworld.com/ to learn more about the conference.

News from SugarCRM! The company introduced Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE) – a new product line for SugarCRM partners and enterprise customers, a set of provisioning and monitoring tools enabling service providers and large organizations to deploy and manage multiple instances – distinct versions of SugarCRM – from a centralized management console. Sugar DCE will be delivered in two versions – one for partners and one for customers. Sugar DCE for Partners allows SugarCRM resellers and hosting providers to deliver SugarCRM in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to their customer base. Sugar DCE for Enterprises allows large companies to manage multiple versions of SugarCRM within their company from a single location.

Is SugarCRM already deployed in your company? Do you keep important customer information in a database or legacy CRM and want to migrate that data to your new SugarCRM account? Ever thought of integrating it, or your SalesForce.com customer list with that in your SugarCRM? Working with SugarCRM on a corporate level becomes more and more attractive.

Savio Rodrigues has posted a brief review of Apatar in his InfoWorld Open Source weblog.

The really cool thing is that Apatar provides a visual designer and mapping tool in order to hide the complexity of ETL and data integration from the typical (business) user.

Yep, that’s the idea. Apatar was primarily created and designed as a business user-oriented tool. On top of visualization that Apatar provides, most of the things the user has to do manually is drag-and-drop icons to the visual integrator. That is, no coding whatsoever. And yet another of Apatar’s corporate user-oriented features is the connectivity itself. Apatar provides connectivity to corporate aplications like SalesForce, SugarCRM, GoldMine, etc. and can be used by pretty much any business user not familiat with development at all.

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote an article discussing the recent mashups’ popularity boost.

“Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.”

Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008 (The diagram by Dion Hinchcliffe from the article mentioned above)

Well, I couldn’t agree more. Mashup technologies are the next generation approach to infromation integration and management.

The figure above illustrates the mashup market distribution very well, But! =)  Apatar is placed in the code mashup section for developers, which doesn’t exactly illustrate its real market placement . Apatar is a strictly data mashup tool designed for business users. It can, of course, be used by developers, but with the sole purpose of simplifying their work and avoiding writing code. Apatar positions itself as a No-Coding tool aimed at making mashups easy and available for consumers and power users (not developers). So, Apatar should’ve been somewhere in the upper left side of the diagram. =)

SalesForce will be shortly making another release with new and enhanced features.

You can take a sneak peak at the new features in the Summer ‘08 Admin Preview.
Here are some highlights from the coming release as singled out in the official SalesForce blog.

Visualforce -With Visualforce now generally available in every edition, it’s easy to build custom user interfaces using Visualforce and new custom components from the Force.com developer community.

Salesforce for Google Apps, a simple, yet powerful combination of your applications that work together and make it incredibly easy for users to communicate, collaborate, and share business information.

Also, the latest release schedule is available at trust.salesforce.com!

And a quick reminder for those who still doubt whether they can/should integrate non-SalesForce contact data (from various databases like Oracle, MySQL etc. and/or applications like Excel, QuickBooks etc.) into SalesForce account, just one word: Apatar.

In one of my previous posts I briefly mentioned the possibility of integrating the data received from CDYNE Demographics web service with your customer database and thus extending your customer information. Well, this is now officially possible with CDYNE Demographics connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector delivers statistical data about customers and allows organizations to identify the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of their current customer base or purchased marketing lists. Aside from that, the connector can be used with any contacts database to determine the age, race, income, as well as type of residence, median income, median house value, or median number of vehicles, all without coding.

Ideal for data modeling and marketing
Whether you need to build customized marketing campaigns and determine ethnic or socio-economic information, this new data quality service from Apatar and CDYNE can be used to tweak your product offerings or advertising messages to reach your desired target market. Non-profit organizations or companies relying on donor support can use this data to match other groups or geographic areas to these traits in order to expand membership base and increase donations and support.

The CDYNE Demographics Web service can help companies better select target groups and learn more about their customers. With Apatar’s visual drag-and-drop interface, this source of useful socio-economic information can be integrated with your database or CRM system in minutes.

You can learn more over here.

There’s been a growth in user-generated content lately, where you have loads of information on your clients scattered all over different resources and it’s next to impossible to have it all in one place and look at it from a bird’s view. Well, what’s the point of trying to unify all this information on your own? What if it’s incomplete and redundant? However if you think of services like CDYNE Demographics that gather statistical data on your customers and provide you with a whole set of information that you can use in your marketing, it’s obvious that this problem is already being taken care of. You don’t need to look for that data in different Web sources. If tools like that are used wisely and integrated into your customer CRM (the type of integration Apatar will be offering shortly) this unstructured user data can become a global value for your company’s growth.

Apatar CEO Renat Khasanshyn is currently attending Interop-Software 2008 data integration conference in Las Vegas, NV. Hope you get a chance to meet him in person, if you happen to be there at the same time. If not, you can always check out Renat’s impressions of the conference in his blog.

And if you didn’t get to visit this Interop, you are just in time to register for the next one in Tokyo, Japan on 9-13 of June this year.

SugarCRM launches new capabilities.

SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced the beta release of new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM. The new reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior. Revamped wireless capabilities deliver the feature-rich SugarCRM user experience on mobile phones, including support for the popular BlackBerry^® and iPhone mobile handsets.

Support for iPhone, huh? I can see a tendency… Everything and everyone goes “i” and mobile. Which isn’t bad, actually. The new wireless features include:

• Improved User Interface provides navigation into edit, detail, and list views, as well as the ability to access employee directory, store preferences and view recent items.
• Rich HTML Client delivers rich presentation of SugarCRM data through a standard Web browser.
• Device Independent allows users to view SugarCRM data from any PDA or smart phone, including the BlackBerry and iPhone.
• New Search Capabilities allow users to find information quickly with the press of a few buttons.

Come to think of it, with SugarCRM going wireless, and with Apatar  SugarCRM connector installed you can now have any of your database (SQL, Oracle) data up in SugarCRM and on your mobile device in practically no time. I love this integrated world!