What can I do with Salesforce?

The common acknowledge Salesforce mission seems to have been carved in stone at the beginning as CRM. But is Salesforce just a CRM?

Let’s start by adding to our thinking path the classic definition of IS – Information System, directly from Wikipedia. By the way, I did not apply yet this year my donation to one of my most loved examples of the Internet democratic and free spirit, thank you, Larry and Jimmy. Will do, though.

Information systems (IS) are formal, sociotechnical, organizational systems designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. In a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people, structure (or roles), and technology.

I confess that I started loving Encyclopedias during my youth, with an adventure as a door-to-door Encyclopedia salesman, although I should point out that I was certified following a training subsidised by the EU. Leaving aside my pseudo-writer’s idiosyncrasies, I believe a definition like this is helpful to establish the scope: to what extent can the expression a Force Beyond, invoked in the title, means that Salesforce can fulfil other needs than just the CRM function, even taking CRM definition in a broader sense?

This is where the story behind this article begins. The challenge of building a significant part of an IS, out of the paradigm of managing a Sales pipeline or provide Customer Service, but rather using Salesforce’s force beyond these main purposes. Take a set of core business processes from a specific industry or area of activity and, on the top of Salesforce, customize and develop a Dedicated IS Application – DISA.

Decision’s gripping

Looking at the picture above, it is sketched a potential IS configuration. In particular, we have there the one that matches the practical case we are describing, made of its components and players, in the assumption that the organizational roles and the organization’s business practices underlie inside those figure’s boxes. Our goal is not to dive inside those, but to understand what can sustain such Architecture Solution decision adoption and what are the pros and cons when deciding to place Salesforce as the main pivotal piece in the puzzle that is any IS.

In practice, Salesforce is our development environment or development platform, sustained by its GUI deployment capability and supported by the Cloud multi-tenant applicational transactional architecture. These are some examples of the supportive technical requirements for the solutions’ assessment initially made. Other possible solutions may be considered, consisting of different products/systems, technologies, as direct competitors, to be evaluated in the Project Business Case. At this stage, we would need to bring the major set of requirements and strategic criteria that are mandatory when validating any Applicational solution. This list can be quite extensive and even subjective, so we will attain to those that were key points for our case, giving it a rating in comparison within a universe of other solutions like Database vendors solutions, WEB development freeware approach or others CRMs platform:

In conclusion, we may say that Salesforce came out at the end of the Solution assessment as a strong and full capable Software Development Platform. Regardless of the out-of-the-box suite, Salesforce goes beyond a simple CRM tool, like it was perceived at the beginning of the process. Thus, Salesforce became our choice.

So, let me tell you more about our path which lasted over the next six years. The project began in 2013, and the capacity to expand Salesforce into other areas inside the organization, increasing the number of DISAs, was a must. This sustained the growth of Salesforce which gained more and more importance, to the point that the Salesforce Account Database, among other particular data components, became the organization’s master repositories. The benefits of using Salesforce programming and workflow design potentials, lead to a fast business process implementation. Watching the IS from the sky, it had become much more organized. The infernal quantity of small ululating applications, that always require data replication to afterward perform some sort of specific business process, had diminished, and so did the costs associated. The business processes interdependency and interoperability became a reality due to the capacity to easily create effective links between them; also, Salesforce’s data centralization made it possible for all stakeholders to see and act on the same final and real Organization’s data. From the sky view could be seen then a much more orthogonal blueprint. Salesforce became a real transformation enabler toward a substantial IS Urbanization.

The Endogenous and Exogenous Antagonization in a Cloud solution

This title’s word choice may, at a first glance, seem vain or smug. It could have been simply “The in and out antagonization”, instead of these highbrow terms. Yet, the reason behind the choice of these words is trying to communicate how one can get in serious troubles when trying to create communication channels between a Cloud solution and the super safe Organization´s Castle, designed and ready to ward off any attempt from the outside to get inside. Giving you some insights on our story, the Castle there was a Telco multinational, spread over the World through its affiliates, interconnected via a core infrastructure of networks at the company’s group level. The result was a complex access policy, to guarantee the security at all levels. UAM [1] control and technical networking hardening are the major visible spikes.

Besides, behind the networks’ technical access architecture, there are the Company policies. At the end of the day, we face not only technical matters, that are eventually solved but also the security demands of the Organization. These demands take the form of very strict governance rules, where often only high management sponsoring can lead to the acceptance or rejection of security exceptions. These risks are normally flagged at the Operational departments and have to be accepted at higher decision levels.

The Cloud challenge to get each time deeper and deeper inside big Corporations causes, in a certain sense, its dematerialization and the disarrangement of its spatial conception. So, as you may have figured, this is still an ongoing battle.

Integration as an economical challenge

Just like we saw in the previous section, a multinational size organization, geographically spread over several countries or even continents, treats the matter of security in a very rigorous way. Data protection, data processing, processes assurance and, more recently, the regulatory requirements imposed by EU GDPR compliance, are good examples of security measures. Together, they turn the Corporate internal services providers, in the networking and application areas, a highly compelling and demanding function.

So, it becomes an even bigger challenge to secure communication between Salesforce and the internal infrastructure. There are a set of mandatory requirements that the final architecture solution must fulfill, such as:

• Data access security – The data stored abroad must in all circumstances be preserved from external attacks and any kind of fraudulent user access. For that purpose, we rely on solutions like encryption at rest and SSO (Single sing on). Moreover, international security certifications are also required.
• Data communication security – Passing information from one point to another must be a reliable process, especially when data travels over the public web. The key strategy here is the certified data encryption and network components to handle network access.
• Data anonymization – Is also a valid security strategy, when required.
• DPA – The Data Processing Agreement is the final guarantee that the data processing of all the involved parts details their processing mechanisms, regarding data persistence and information sharing. When we mention “all the involved parts”, we are not only referring to Salesforce, but also to any AppExchange component used in the solution, for instance. Besides, the Data Processing Agreement may involve high liability clauses.

All these will be summed up to the project’s ROI, thus increasing the return challenge. So, if another variable becomes part of the Integration Solution, such as a high-end commercial EAI tool, our cost will suffer a markup of around 200-150K OPEX, depending on the product chosen. In fact, to use a Cloud EAI product, it has to pass through the evaluation process described in the above list, to be considered compliant. Only then can it be approved by the Internal regulatory organization’s departments.

Given all of this, projects just like the one in this story, get an overhead of admin work, meetings, RFIs to vendors, and additional product licensing. Besides, the security compliance assessment may even result in implementation limitations and new security compliance requirements to be developed. Therefore, managing these activities requires an experimented team, capable of driving these multi-players processes. We may say that one of the most crucial implementer’s jobs is brokering between the Organization and all these new external partners. Besides, the fact that stakeholders are often spread over different countries adds complexity to the business, making remote teams coordination a challenging daily reality.

To mitigate the potential increased costs derived from the demanding needs of integration, in our case, we adapted our choices bearing in mind not just the costs, but also the project’s timelines. The Integration Services were brought inside the Organization infrastructure (on-premises) and an in-house solution was developed using on-premises servers. This admittedly simplified our activities, in the following ways:

• The Security assessment was restricted to Salesforce
• The back-end communication between the other IS APPs and the Integration Services become compliant since it was all inside and the Salesforce security assessment covered simultaneously the link between our in-house Integration Services solution and Salesforce.
• The number of players was reduced which allowed a shorter timeline commitment.

The Channel between Integration Services and Salesforce could also be used as an Integration bus, where several IS APPs could be served through a unique access point between our Castle and Salesforce.

The final result for the Integration Services was a simplified ETL tool, complemented by on-demand specific functional WEB Services. This tool was named CloudIS – Cloud Integration Services.

The CloudIS Agent is a generic JAVA engine dropped inside the Organization, capable of reading a pre-configured ETL Task consisting of a source point and a destination point. The access and connection to the point-to-point are guaranteed by connectors, depending on the entities that make the point-to-point pair. The ETL Task will contain within its definition the data mapping/exchanging rules.

So, after what I have said before about the in/out antagonization, we may ask how is it possible to mix in the same picture in and out zones together? This is because the capacity to perform outbound calls, from inside the organization, is less restrictive then receiving inbound calls. But, if there are restrictive security polices even for outbound calls, then each outbound integration point also requires a specific security assessment process.

Another interesting aspect of this solution is the fact that the Organization’s Salesforce instance where the DISAs (our custom APPs) are, is doubly used. Not only does it host all user’s DISAs, but it also hosts the Integration Service Framework. Inside the latter, the Integration Services are configured and parameterized to be processed by the Agent. The system user can then check logs, and control what needs to run and when to do it. All of this works as a Process control framework for our Integration services. However, alternatively, a CloudIS Agent can be connected to a Salesforce instance other than the one that serves the Organization’s DISAs. All this flexibility allows for options that fit better the business. In fact, whenever a CloudIS Agent is launched in the back-end servers, the first thing it checks is the instance of the Salesforce CloudIS Framework TM. This information is stored in the Agent back-end configuration and it connects there to start processing any task that must be executed. The principle is then to interconnect two points using a dedicated plug-in and perform the data operations described in each task metadata.

A Force beyond Sales

Returning to the parabola launched at the begging of this article:

– Hi João, what can I do with Salesforce?

Dear IS, I’m pleased to say that Salesforce can be a very powerful element in your IS landscape. We have achieved the deployment of many DISAs, many of which with a high degree of functional complexity, only seen in specific dedicated applications! Even capable of responding to the digitalization of specific areas of human activity.

With this project, we enabled a faster processes’ business data mapping into customized data objects and fields, ready to be used in the GUI on the fly. Besides, we also achieved a significant batch processing capacity on the billing and general ledger reporting. All of this, inside the Cloud.

The cherry on the cake came with the CloudIS solution that allowed to break through the cloud isolation against all the other on-premises components.

Well, to be honest, I must refer a second cherry, no less important: the capacity to deploy changes without causing system availability interruptions and the easiness to develop and customize are awesome. Oh! And, maybe there are more but I’ve to end this story now.

Ok, you might say that these last paragraphs consist of just consulting fluffy arguments, bla-bla-bla. But let me remind that for who is in this activity for a while, the nightmares around these now apparently easy Systems’ activities, can still take away the sleep at night.

[1] User Access Management

We hope this article has been interesting for you and that you could learn from us! Further articles will be available soon with more detailed about the CloudIS product! So, just subscribe to our Knowledge Center to find more articles on this and on Salesforce, in general! Feel free to drop us a comment or suggest any topic you would like to see covered in one of our posts! 🙂