Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions help organizations manage key sales processes and customer, prospect, and contact information. The effectiveness of a CRM initiative depends on the quality of the customer and prospect data that is available to the sales and marketing teams. Integration between Salesforce.com, a cloud CRM solution, and IBM® InfoSphere® Master Data Management Standard and Advanced Editions helps organizations gain a comprehensive and accurate 360° view of their customers, accounts, prospects, and the relationships between those objects.
Some of the common data challenges that CRM users encounter include duplicate customer data, lack of data enrichment, and poor data quality. Sales and marketing teams rely on customer data that is comprehensive and accurate, that represents the collective knowledge of the organization, and that is enriched with external information that can be searched and easily viewed. When integrated with a CRM solution like Salesforce.com, InfoSphere MDM can help organizations address these common data challenges and improve the effectiveness of their CRM initiatives.
The InfoSphere MDM and Salesforce.com integration sample contains a set of prebuilt artifacts and integration capabilities that can be used to jump-start an integration between these two applications. This integration supports automated processes to search customer records, enrich account information, and remediate duplicate records from your Salesforce.com cloud application.
The integration scenarios (sample projects) are available from the IBM Samples and Assets site. The integration scenarios support integration between Salesforce.com and on-premises InfoSphere MDM. The integration flow between products is illustrated in the following graphic. IBM WebSphere® Cast Iron® Live, along with a secure connector, is used as the middleware interface between InfoSphere MDM and Salesforce.com cloud for real-time and near real-time integration. IBM InfoSphere Information Server Service Pack for Salesforce.com is used for bulk import and export of data between InfoSphere MDM and Salesforce.com.