Cloud computing is reshaping the IT landscape and is making particular in-roads in Customer Relationship Management deployments. That seems particularly appropriate, since CRM is used primarily by that most mobile and globally dispersed group of employees, the sales force. Having an application tethered to headquarters that’s used by the Blackberry crowd doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

Optimize Cloud CRM

With Cloud Integration (Part 1)

Cloud CRM solutions are an attractive alternative to traditional on-premise  CRM applications because they allow organizations to rapidly meet the changing needs of the business. They appeal to IT because of the lower number of resources needed for deployment and to business users because they are able to start using these new systems quickly. Further, everybody likes subscription pricing because it means fewer budgetary issues get in the way of procuring the new application.

Deploying Cloud CRM does not come without its challenges, however.  Cloud CRM relies on critical business information that’s not automatically accessible; the data exists in highly customized on-premise back-end systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and financial applications. In order to realize the full benefit of Cloud CRM solutions, this challenge must be addressed, and it often becomes a bigger hurdle than anybody anticipated.

As the success of Cloud CRM solutions grow, what was once a department-level strategy to reduce cost and increase the effectiveness of sales teams, may now face hurdles when growing to support enterprise wide scale. Users now require access to critical systems throughout the organization and may have a plethora of existing applications, including other on-demand applications, in addition to on premise systems, which they must integrate with on a daily basis. The result is that integration becomes more critical to the continued success and adoption of such a solution.

There are three key issues to consider:

Getting information into Cloud CRM solutions. Back-end systems contain some of the most valuable corporate assets in a company as they often represent many decades of business knowledge and operational experience. For a Cloud CRM solution to be useful from the start, the information, such as order history, opportunities and contacts contained in back-end systems must be migrated to the new solution.

Synchronizing information between the Cloud CRM and back-end systems. Back-end systems are most likely to be the systems of record for critical corporate information about customers, products, orders and more. Cloud CRM solutions need to synchronize information with the particular systems of record so the company can have a single, accurate and real-time view of customers and products. While dealing with different data formats and complex workflows is challenging, these integrations also must be secure, reliable and provide complete visibility.

Extracting information from Cloud CRM solutions. Most companies generate a wide variety of operational and business intelligence (BI) reports based on data from multiple systems. While most leading Cloud CRM solutions offer rich reporting capability, this functionality is limited to what is contained within the application itself. Therefore, information from Cloud CRM solutions must be easily transferable into existing reporting and BI applications to provide holistic dashboards for increased visibility.
Continued in Part 2

Written by :

Don Cooper