Integration… what do you do when it needs to be done, yet you realize you don’t have the money, the time or the assets to invest into it?

Below are a few ways out. Each is widely used, so the selection depends largely on your company’s priorities and the nature of business. before I start, let’s make it clear that leaving the problem untackled or allowing your own customer to deal with it is not an option.

First, and probably the least effort-consuming is turning to professional services. This implies having a SaaS vendor come in and do the integration for you and provide you with the most recent on-demand integration tricks. A good option, as long as you’re not scared to spend money.

Second, you could build your own professional services team to cater for your company’s data integration needs or even build your own integration solution. But this too is an approach reserved for larger companies that can afford to allot staff members and time for this purpose.

Third, an approach for risky spirits and real players, find a partner that specializes in your area of aintegration. Trust me, you won’t ahve a problem finding one. The problem that might arise is, again, time and compatibility of your business with the data integration ambitions of your partner ISV. But there’s always a way out, right?

What’s right for your company?

I just came across a superb article that chews data integration out for you the best possible way! For business users that do not write code, it contains a comprehensive description of data integration approaches to keep in mind when selecting an integration provider to work with. I personaly consider manual integration, where you need to do all the work and write code quite limited as compared to “application approach”, where a ready application will do everything for you.

“The applications, which are specialized computer programs, would locate, retrieve and integrate the information for you. During the integration process, the applications must manipulate the data so that the information from one source is compatible with the information from the other source.”

“Most data integration system designers assume that the end goal is to create as little work for the end user as possible, so they tend to focus on applications and data warehousing techniques.” That’s the idea: the easier for the end user (I particularly mean corporate users that cannot afford to lose time on integrating their customer lists and data manually), the better!

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.

This article by David Linthicum suggests that people seem to be confusing integration with SOA these days. The thing is, integration came first and later on, when SOA came to take its place, a lot of vendors simply started calling their integration tools SOA. David notes, “integration, on its own, is not architecture. Thus, just binding systems together is not architecture, thus not SOA.”

However, if SOA is new and, you can’t argue, the idea behind both of these contepts is fairly similar (instead of building new and duplicating old applications and data, the technology should connect the existing vital parts and build up on them)… doesn’t it sound like it’s just another case of a fresh PR for an old, but improved technology?

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!