Every enterprise architect knows one thing: a new system means any number of new integrations (and headaches). Heterogeneity is the norm of enterprise architecture, so integration projects are common. However, system integration is expensive, challenging, brittle and time consuming work that slows enterprise-wide innovation by distracting software developers from more valuable work - like reducing the ever-growing project backlog!

One of the core design points of the Salesforce Platform is low-code, automatic integration across Salesforce's Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Platform: they all talk to each other with zero additional effort. Above and beyond that, these systems offer a number of other integration options that make Salesforce a good citizen in large, technically diverse architecture - it plays well with others. Let's take a deeper dive into how this integration works.

At the very heart of every system is some kind of data store or database - the source of truth and raison d'etre. At Salesforce, when we talk about objects, we're really talking about our metadata-driven database. Sales Cloud is architected with several core objects: Account, Contact and Opportunity to start, although there are many more. Service Cloud uses the same database and adds a few new objects, first and foremost among these is Case. Case is exciting because it ties together critical customer data from the sales cycle — Account and Contact, with data from the service environment, the Case.

This means your sales automation solution and your service management solution now talk to each other out of the box, without any additional system integration work. Your team that is working cases automatically has access to the larger context in which those cases arose, and vice versa, your sales team now knows what's happening outside of their silo.

Compare this to conventional enterprise architectures consisting of disjoint sales and service solutions - see below. They don't talk amongst themselves out of the box, and sharing information amongst them is a special project requiring special skills. ROI takes longer and is lower over time, and integrations run the risk of breaking when any of the systems changes or is upgraded.

Current Architectures: fragmented, complex, brittle

What's really powerful — and, frankly, is the reason I've focused on Salesforce technologies for the last 10 years — is that you can extend Salesforce's integration vision to almost any custom business application your enterprise might need using the Salesforce Platform and building custom apps. Of course, these apps share the same database and services used by Sales Cloud and Service cloud. This means your custom apps — product development, employee relations, project management, etc. — are all context-aware without requiring a bespoke integration effort. And by the way, referential integrity across the data is a guarantee!

I started by noting that technological heterogeneity is the norm for most modern large enterprises. When an enterprise adopts Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform, there are still external systems which will want to feed or consume data associated with your customers. Ease of external integration is just as central to Salesforce's DNA as out-of-the-box data sharing, and the system features comprehensive, auto-generated APIs and other flexible integration options, including support for the industry-standard OData protocol through Salesforce Connect - imagine integration without data movement!

A new and highly flexible addition to these capabilities is called Platform Events - and we think it's a game-changer. Software professionals have long heard discussed Event Driven Architectures, but they frankly have not yet become mainstream. Platform Events help developers to bring Event Driven Architectures to their organizations quickly and easily. Defined with a few clicks, and integrated as necessary with only a bit of code, Platform Events communicate using objects sent and received using a one to many publish-and-subscribe (“pub-sub”) model. Platform Events work within Salesforce and also across arbitrary, off-platform, third party systems.

Modern Architectures: loosely-coupled, composable, and event-centric

As you consider how to put your customer at the center of everything you do, it's important to think about how your systems talk to each other. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform provide a tightly integrated experience that lets your team focus on driving innovation that matters, while auto-generated APIs, Salesforce Connect, and Platform Events provide an extensible integration framework across both legacy and Cloud applications.

As a grizzled veteran of a few too many large integration projects, the future looks both exciting and (finally) within reach.

Reid Carlberg is Salesforce VP for Trailhead Content and Evangelism. You can email him at reid.carlberg@salesforce.com or tweet him at @ReidCarlberg.