Data integration is a huge headache for IT leaders. Recent research by Confirmit showed that 48% of those surveyed said it was the #1 pain point in their department.

I’ve been there. During my nine years as a CTO at J.P. Morgan Chase, first for the investment bank and then the entire organization, I had my share of integration challenges.

My Integration Experience

What drove me nuts was how hard it was for systems to connect and the number of systems that we ended up using that didn’t come with the ability to talk to each other. On top of that, when we did want to do some sort of integration, we were almost always forced to make another copy of the data. And then there was the cost barrier.

Say the business wanted a piece of data in their mobile app to reference at a customer meeting. IT’s response would typically be: “That’s in a system we’re not currently talking to, so we’ve got to get a systems integrator, set up a project or build an integration link. Do you really want this data? Because it will cost about a half a million bucks.”

Typically the business user would reply “don’t worry about it.” Yet they were still missing that piece of data. Our goal at Salesforce is to take down the barrier of connectivity, so IT doesn’t have to say “it’s too expensive” or “will take too much time.” So they can give the end user valuable data to make better decisions when they ask for it.

Integration Made Easy

Salesforce1 Lightning Connect makes it incredibly easy to access data that is outside of Salesforce in real-time by reference. Because the data is treated as if it is within Salesforce, you can search it, use it in Visualforce and Apex to build custom apps, and access it via APIs. Another bonus: the data still resides in the originating app, so there is no storage footprint.

With Salesforce1 Lightning, we’ve already made it so you can build mobile apps fast, apps that need data that’s in Salesforce. And because these apps are so rich and engaging, you’re going to want to put more and more data into them so you can get that data to the end user, fast. Lightning Connect makes any data outside Salesforce incredibly accessible for your apps.

Frankly, I wish more systems took the approach that connectivity is important because everything lives in an ecosystem, especially in a large company. Whatever you’re deploying into, you’re almost certainly going to have to get data from somewhere else. Yet many systems unfortunately ignore that or leave it as a developer focused exercise. 

Turning Back Time

If I’d had Lightning Connect during my time as CTO, it would have made a whole lot of work we did with Salesforce a whole lot easier. I think of one implementation where we had to connect Salesforce to eight backend systems. It took a couple of guys about six months to do it with one of the integration tools.

When you look at it now, there’s a lot of stock trade data there that didn’t need to be copied. Most of it could have been sourced from elsewhere, shortening that project timeline dramatically. At the end of the day, that’s one of the CTO’s jobs: to help their development teams go faster by leveraging technologies.

Check out my related article, where I take a technical deep dive into how IT can use Lightning Connect to solve their specific integration headaches. Read it here.

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