StrikeIron Blog

Mapping Web Services Output to Fields in Salesforce.com

One of the cool things about our new solutions for Salesforce.com is the ability to map the output from a Web services call to the desired fields within a Salesforce account or contact record. While there are defaults of course, this provides a great deal of flexibility for organizations with custom layouts and fields, enabling them to take advantage of utilizing live external data to enhance contact records with zero integration and no ongoing data maintenance effort. This enables a fast and flexible approach to utilize external Web services directly within Salesforce.com.

To me, this is an example implementation of the proverbial "last mile", where a business user is able to integrate live data from external sources into the business applications that they are already using on a daily basis, completely customizable to fit their specialized needs, and with no programmers necessary.

In the example below, you can see the ability to choose within which fields the output data from our US Address Verification Web Service are stored in Salesforce.com, including correcting existing address fields, as well as providing the ability to store the additional data (such as county, geocodes, zip+4, etc..) that is returned from the address query.

Check it out: http://www2.strikeiron.com/Partners/PartnersSalesforce.com.aspx

Or search for "strikeiron" on the AppExchange.

SaaS Market Continues to Grow, Remains Attractive for Third Party Vendors

In a report released last week, the Gartner Group reported they expect worldwide Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue to Grow 22 percent in 2009, becoming a $9.6 billion USD market. SaaS is expected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.4% through 2013, while the total market CAGR is projected at 5.2%. Clearly, SaaS applications continue to gather steam.

One area that stands out in the report is SaaS "office applications" (such as Google Docs, Zoho, Zimbra, EditGrid, and Microsoft Office Live), with its four-fold projection growth in 2009 from $136 million in 2008 to $512 million. Clearly this is also a major growth area because of its broad applicability, speed of innovation, and potential cost savings, and probably frightening to some well known entities in the traditional software industry.

While companies such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite are poster children of SaaS applications in general, SaaS CRM still only represents 18% of the CRM market. However, because of the high rate of adoption, rapid deployment, and virtually no ongoing maintenance, third party vendors will still find this market very appealing, largely because the first question from Sales and Support teams doesn't have to be "what version are you running?" The decrease in complexity in building on top of and supporting existing markets in the SaaS CRM space versus the traditional CRM space is dramatic.

However, It will still be a long time until on-premise software has any kind of swan song. While 30% of procurement software is expected to go SAAS, only 1% of the ERP market is likely to be penetrated by SAAS applications in 2013 according to the Gartner report. And due to privacy concerns, medical record data for example is a long way off from ever being stored on external systems. Don't rule it out entirely though - there once was a time where the idea of keeping your money in a bank was ridiculed (and perhaps in light of the current economy rightfully so!)

While the SaaS star continues to rise, and those of us on the cutting edge will continue to beat its drum, for a long time to come it will only represent a piece of the software industry. So for most of us, that means we will continue to live in a heterogeneous software world for the foreseeable future.

Force.com Native Integration for Federal Do Not Call Lists

If you take a look at my blog entry from March 28th, you will see that I discussed an easy way to avoid federal lawsuits by incorporating Federal Do Not Call lists in to your business processes via an easy-to-integrate Web Services API. Now I am happy to say that it is even easier if you are a Salesforce.com user.

We have now integrated our Do Not Call Web Services API into Salesforce.com, and the resulting application has now been certified as a native Force.com application available within the Salesforce.com AppExchange. Telephone numbers within Salesforce.com contact records are instantly checked against U.S. Federal, State, Direct Marketing Association, and Wireless Do Not Call lists. Colorful, visual indicators within the contact record easily identify records that can be contacted and those who can't without risking an infraction.

It also is very flexible with the ability to map fields graphically from the Do Not Call service to the Salesforce contact record, including custom fields, as input and output parameters. And of course, all of the updating of the source Do Not Call list data is handled by us, so uploading and downloading of contact records for "Do Not Call processing" have now gone the way of legacy CRM systems.

Check it out on the AppExchange here:

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/apex/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016wjaEAA