This is the first in a series of blogs based on an original post titled unlocking SAP with Force.com. This week’s guest blogger is Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of SnapLogic. We invite you to join the conversation about new ways to build a social front office around a traditional back office system.

Gaurav Dhillon, CEO of SnapLogic, on Building the SAP Social Enterprise:

Many CIOs have bet their careers investing millions of dollars into a “system of record,” like SAP, to run their company’s back-office. Large multi-nationals have reaped huge benefits from SAP by being able to do business process engineering across their worldwide subsidiaries.

While you need the stability of on-premise financial systems like SAP, you also need the agility of the Cloud to transform into a social enterprise. And with today’s increasingly competitive business environment, front-office business application platforms like Salesforce.com have become key in delivering both accurate and relevant business data to everyone in the company who touch the customer including sales teams, customer service, marketing, finance and operations.

Integration is critical to making the most of both your front and back office systems, and moving towards a social enterprise. For example, you can extend the value of your Salesforce.com deployment by bringing in product, order and payment data from your SAP vaults so your salespeople can generate accurate quotes and gain a true 360 degree view of their customers. You can validate your new Salesforce.com records against SAP data and automatically update the appropriate fields within each system. And you can realize a greater return on your SAP investment by pulling customer pipeline information from Salesforce.com into SAP to help forecast or manage inventory.

In an environment where valuable business data is spread and continually updated across multiple systems, it no longer makes sense to declare one single system of record for the entire company. The most innovative IT leaders are shifting their focus to building a best-of-breed “collection of services” – built, borrowed, or bought – that meets their exact technology needs. For example, Salesforce.com customers can benefit greatly by leveraging the Force.com platform to build new custom applications that leverage both front and back office systems.

This approach lets you adopt innovative business practices by enabling greater business agility, productivity and collaboration. However, additional diversity within your IT portfolio can increase the risk of inconsistent data, so it’s imperative to incorporate data quality and data governance controls directly into your integration architecture. In fact, during our recent Webinar about connecting Salesforce.com to SAP, over 100 attendees (most from large enterprises) were looking for simpler, more flexible and secure integration solutions to connect Salesforce.com with a wide range of other enterprise systems. And for those of you most interested in seeing an SAP Salesforce.com integration in action, here’s a short demo of how that looks inside of the SnapLogic Designer:

 

Today’s ever-changing connection challenges require a powerful, yet flexible integration approach that can move at cloud speed and scale. An integration approach that links every individual application, cloud service, or Web site in a way that enables employees to be well-informed, responsive and agile. The most flexible approaches are based on modern Web standards, which enable a future-proofed integration architecture that won’t break during SAP upgrades or other IT portfolio changes.  

With all these needs of tomorrow’s connected, social enterprise in mind, we built the SnapLogic Integration Platform on a lightweight, yet powerfully strong RESTful architecture that scales just like the web itself. This allows SnapLogic customers to establish an abstraction layer that seamlessly connects Salesforce.com and SAP applications as well as additional internal and external data sources and applications. This gives you the freedom to bring even more useful data into SAP and Salesforce.com – from social media and mobile sources, to Web analytics, new niche SaaS applications and more.  By creating a “Switzerland” layer, you can integrate all your business applications and reach your business agility goals quickly and easily.