Scribe Software Blog

Scribe presenting at eXtremeCRM and mAX in Rome Feb 3-6, 2013

If you're attending either of these terrific Microsoft Dynamics CRM and AX - focused events, we want to see you! At eXtremeCRM Rome – let us show you how the leader in Dynamics CRM integration can help you and your customers accelerate your business and make better decisions, faster, with Dynamics CRM in 2013.

Stop by our booth #11 to meet Henk Adriaans, the NEW Director, EMEA for Scribe. Lynn Harrington has returned to the US to focus on our growing ISV area of our business, and Henk is now leading the Scribe EMEA Team. Prior to joining Scribe in 2013, Henk served for close to 25 years in leadership positions in channel and direct sales & marketing, with companies like Oracle, QAD and most recently Exact Software.

Join Peter Chase, Executive VP and Founder of Scribe with the latest on Scribe Online. See demonstrations of solutions for ExactTarget, Silverpop, GoToWebinar, Znode, and more. Learn how your organization can create and sell market-leading integration solutions powered by Scribe Online. He is presenting Tuesday at 11:45am in Bernini 3, "Scribe Online: Revolutionizing Integration Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM". He also spoke during the Executive Summit, "Breaking Through the Barriers" how to scale your business and best practices for growth and re-invention of your business.

Other exciting news: we have 5 of your peers who are Scribe MVPs attending eXtremeCRM EMEA, and will be spending time in our booth. If you have Scribe product questions, want to talk through a CRM data integration issue you may be stuck on, or just want to see how YOU can become a Scribe MVP, be sure to stop by and visit us at booth #11.

Are you also attending mAX in Rome? If so, please join Linda Johnson, EMEA Regional Sales Manager and Anders Jeppesen, Senior Integration Specialist, AlfaPeople on Wednesday 2/5 at 11am for "Scribe or the Microsoft Connector: 5 reasons to Consider Scribe for integration with Dynamics AX."

The Five Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 5. Expandability

In my last installment I spoke of the need for Supportability in your integration solution once you have put it into production. In this final post, I will discuss the need to expand your integration solution with the demands of your business.

To coin the old adage, there is only one thing in business that is constant and that is change. What happens if you identify some other touch points that need to be integrated? What is the impact of adding a new business application that is integral to your business processes into the mix? What happens if you make significant changes to the way your people interact with customers? How do you deal with the replacement of one of the applications involved? What if you acquire another company with different business systems and processes? These things occur frequently and should account in your integration strategy.

A common mistake with data integration is trying to do too much the first time. Seeking to integrate any and all touch points that you can envision up front can weigh a project down and significantly increase risk. A smart approach is to prioritize the different integration processes, particularly those things that will drive CRM user adoption in the initial phase, and then tackle a manageable number at the first phase. Additional integration processes can then be added over time.

This need for expandability requires that we think strategically and implement tactically when it comes to integration. It is important that the tools and approaches you utilize are nimble enough to meet your short-term needs without busting the budget while forming a strong foundation where future expansion can be easily accommodated.

Thanks for reading these posts and remember these five essential elements for successful data integration; reusability, flexibility, transferability, supportability, and expandability. And as I mentioned when introducing this topic, these elements should shed some light on the capabilities of our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight.

Partnering for Cloud Success

The advent of Cloud computing and the availability of cloud based business applications is dramatically changing the IT environment for companies of all sizes. The Cloud offers simplification…simplification of the user experience and simplification for those responsible for managing the application deployments. It enables companies to get to value faster with their IT investments, allowing them to focus less on technology issues and place more attention on redefining and streamlining their business processes.

At the same time, the rapid adoption of the cloud, including the accelerating use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, has resulted in an explosion of new data coming at companies from all directions, including from employees, customers, vendors, partners, and other market influencers. Companies that can integrate, assimilate, and make sense of that information across the enterprise will be the winners. Being in the data integration business, this is really good news for our organization. To take advantage of this opportunity, however, will require us to work closely with the hundreds of implementation partners we rely on to deliver our products in order to meet the changing economic model of the Cloud.

A number of our partners are responding quickly to this changing landscape. They are transforming large portions of their practices from being technology integrators to becoming higher level solution providers. Many of these partners have built large portions of their business on doing traditional "systems integration", helping their customers make sense of many layers of the technology stack. With much of that work being collapsed by these new cloud services, these partners are moving towards creating industry or vertical market solutions that establish a new differentiation for their companies in the marketplace. Not only do these solutions offer built in application functionality inherent to the industry but also include pre-defined integration processes to a number of different Cloud and premised based endpoints.

Responding to these changes is having a profound effect on the businesses of ISVs as well as implementation partners. The most obvious is the profit and cash flow impact of the subscription model versus the old software and maintenance model. It certainly does not stop there however. How do implementation partners re-work the skills and talents of their work force to meet the new demands of our customers? How do we provide better tools to support these new demands? How do implementation partners become adept at creating and packaging IP? How do both ISVs and implementation partners look beyond selling software to the delivering an entire end to end user experience? How do we address the operational issues around upgrading and supporting solutions? I could go on and on.

On November 7^th, 2011, I will be participating in a panel at the Cloud Channel Summit entitled "Building Effective Cloud Channels: What's Working and What's Not". This should be a very lively and informative discussion as each of the panelists is wrestling with this question in their own business. While each of the panelists will bring their own insights and ideas around how to build these channels, the broader macro level issues outlined above will be the lens by which they should be evaluated. Addressing this important issue of collaboration between ISVs and implementation partners is critical to the broader adoption of Cloud services. I look forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing the ideas of my contemporaries.

The Five Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 4. Supportability

Last time I discussed the need for easy transferability of the ongoing management of integration solutions from development to production. I will now discuss the fourth capability essential to a collaborative integration platform, Supportability.

Moving an integration process into production introduces the same set of challenges as moving any application or solution out of QA into production. Users always use application in ways that were not contemplated by the original integration design, resulting in unexpected errors and exceptions. Modifying the design of the end point applications after the integration is implemented may disrupt the integration processes. Changes to the overall IT environment may interrupt connections between the various applications. In short, business happens and things stop working or not work as intended. Your integration approach should include a robust set of error detection, diagnosis and remediation tools.

Is there a way to proactively monitor the health of the integration and raise alerts when things are not functioning properly? Are there meaningful execution and error logs that enable someone to quickly identify the root cause of any issue? Does the integration process have built in re-try mechanisms that address any timing issues (for example, attempting to process an order transaction before the related customer record has been created in your target application)?

A major area to consider with any integration solution is the ability to handle gracefully upgrades to your business applications. For example, if a customer moves from Dynamics CRM 4.0 to Dynamics CRM 2011, what will the impact be on the integration? Is the upgrade simply a testing exercise where things for the large part continue to work or does it require a re-write of the integration? The best integration solutions create an abstraction layer between the integration processes themselves and the API of the endpoint applications. The process only sees the abstracted interface and when the endpoint application is upgraded, it is simply a matter of modifying the interface between the API and the abstraction layer. If you are looking at 3^rd party adapter products, make sure you interrogate this question fully. You will be glad you did later.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the integration approach needs to be very reliable. In other words, "It just needs to work". The best integration is one that no one ever knows about or notices (of course, until it stops working and then it gets a lot of attention). Integration solutions that are not rock solid are disruptive and costly to your business as well a significant drain on your resources. Users may not trust the data they are looking at and go to other methods that may be more time consuming and costly to the business. They may stop using the CRM system all together and cobble their own "system" which completely defeats the purpose of your CRM implementation and integration. Your resources that could be on other, more important projects are now working on fixing that integration – again.

In the next and final installment, I conclude with a discussion of the need for expandability.

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 3. Transferability

Last time I discussed the need for flexibility when designing and implementing integration solutions. In this installment, I cover the third capability essential to a collaborative integration platform, Transferability.

In many cases, the people responsible for designing and implementing the integration processes are not the same people who will be administering them once they are put into production. Integration design and development is generally performed by business and/or data analysts who gather business requirements, create a design that meets those requirements, and develop the integration itself. The design of the integration could include defining the events that initiate an integration process, capturing, filtering and/or merging the relevant data affected by the events, mapping and transforming that data, establishing rules for data ownership, and designing error capture and remediation. The implementation itself involves completing the unit and system testing to ensure that the integration processes are ready for production. The final task of the integration developer is ensuring the integration is working in production and transitioning the ongoing ownership.

This hand off of the solution is very critical to the success of the integration project. How do you transfer ownership of the solution to someone that does not have intimate knowledge of the detailed design? Are there tools and dashboards that exist that can enable this person to know when things are working well and when they are not? Is there a straightforward mechanism in place for them to repair data issues? It is easy to identify which issues they can resolve or which issues they should contact the integration developer? If the original integration developer is no longer available, can someone else with integration design skills quickly understand the integration design and make modifications or enhancements to it?

This issue of transferability is also critical to the partner. It is very costly for a partner to pull their integration designers off other their other customer projects and have them fix an issue at an existing deployment. Depending on the issue, having to go back and fix or constantly maintain the integration can negatively impact the customer and partner relationship. A good partner makes sure their customer understands the integration software, the design of their particular integrations, and that the customer can maintain it.

Next up…Supportability.

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 2. Flexibility

This is the next installment of the posts I started in April about the key capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. It has been over a month since I blogged about the first in the series about Reusability. Things got a bit away from me over the last five weeks but I hope to pick up the pace. So here it goes. The second big capability is Flexibility.

Flexibility

Integration requires a flexible approach. There are infinite varieties of integration needs as there are customers and business systems. One key driver of this variability is industry. The integration processes across different vertical markets can be dramatically different. Take for example, the integration of an order process between CRM and ERP in a distribution company versus a capital goods manufacturer. The integration for the distribution company is going to very transaction intensive with paramount emphasis on ensuring that the sales and services teams have up to date information on the location and delivery schedules of goods, while the capital goods manufacturer will likely focus on leveraging back office data about their customers to up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services. Integration processes can also vary greatly within industries based on differences in business models from company to company. A simple example is the difference between a direct selling and a channel selling organization.

Typical areas of variability in integration design include:

• The data design of each business application involved and the transformations needed to resolve the design differences between those business applications,
• The rules of data ownership: which system is the master of what data; which systems can insert or update certain records or fields; etc.,
• The actions that trigger integration events and the rules to process those integrations.

Beware of pre-packaged integration solutions, particularly around this issue of flexibility. They may seem a lot easier to implement, but may not give the user close to what their business requires. Even if a customer can take advantage of a pre-packaged integration solution, the solution will almost always require modification to address the customer's needs. These changes can range from minimal to extensive depending on how unique the business requirements are.

Custom code to achieve integration has a major advantage where it offers unlimited flexibility to meet a customer's needs. There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that one has the resources with the skills and time necessary. The downside is cost in people, time, and money including the initial cost of the implementing the integration project and the ongoing costs of supporting and modifying the integration over time. The cost of custom code is always more expensive and can be out of reach for some customers. For many customers, the right answer is a third party integration tool that combines a graphical user interface, templates for common integration scenarios, and significant depth of configuration capabilities. An integration tool gives customers to the ability get exactly what they need while significantly reducing (or in some cases, eliminating) the costs and complexity of a custom coded integration.

Next up…Transferability.

 

The 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 1. Reusability

In my previous post I introduced the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform. Now I'll get into the good stuff and begin with capability #1, Reusability.

Reusability

Partners invest heavily in developing the depth and expertise around the unique business requirements of their specific industry focus to provide solutions that deliver competitive advantage for their clients. A key question for any partner is how to take advantage of this industry knowledge and business process and distribute that quickly and easily to a broader set of clients without having to "reinvent the wheel" at every client site. A packaged solution offered by a partner benefits the customer by offering a lower cost and lower risk integration option, as the they gain the benefit of the partner's expertise not only in the industry but also with the integration needs typical of customers in that industry. Customers may do an integration project once or not at all; the partner brings their experience and insight from many integration projects.

This sounds all well and good, but is not so easy to implement in practice. Invariably things get in the way. First, the project teams at partners are generally under a lot of pressure to complete their project and then move on to the next customer. They do not have the time to package the solution into something that can be re-used. Even if they did have the time, not all of the elements of a customer's specific solution are transferable to another customer. There are a number of elements that are very specific to the particular deployment. There may also be unique intellectual property within the solution that the partner may want to protect. The solution may also be implemented by an individual lacking the same depth of skills as the original designer of the solution and so, requires a more streamlined deployment experience. All of these things stand in the way of achieving the great benefits of reusability.

A collaborative integration approach:

• Provides partners the ability to repackage an integration solution in a simple and easy manner. It should not add significant incremental effort to any project.
• Makes it easy to pick and choose the common elements of a solution implementation that can be packaged and re-used.
• Protects the partner's intellectual property. A partner may invest significant effort to develop unique and innovative methods or approaches to solving particular industry or application integration challenges. Without some way to protect this intellectual property, partners may be reluctant to package the integration and spend the time re-implementing the integration at each client site which increases cost and time for both the partner and customer.
• Allows customization which may be something as simple as a wizard based UI where configuration choices are driven by metadata provided by the user to the use of a full suite of integration design tools depending on the complexity and uniqueness of the integration needed.

That is all for now. Next up…Flexibility.

Introducing the 5 Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform

In my previous blog post, I spoke of the changing role of the partner brought on by the advent of cloud computing. In this new world, partners are moving away from a reliance on 'systems integration' and moving towards creating value-added industry focused solutions. A critical component to these solutions is the need to help companies make sense of the integration requirements to other business applications and data sources. When developing an integration approach, it is important to recognize the different and evolving roles between the partner and customer throughout the phases of an application deployment. Even if there isn't a partner involved, in many cases IT organizations act in a similar capacity as partner to the business to deliver a successful CRM project. A collaborative approach to integration between "partner" and "customer" best serves the integration needs of companies deploying these business applications.

It is rare that one person has all of the skills and knowledge necessary to fully implement an integration solution. In a CRM integration project for example, the development of the integration requires a solid understanding of the design of the CRM system and the key customer processes that drive the integration need. It also requires detailed knowledge of the other applications, many of them complex back office applications. The ability to allow multiple people to participate in the development and design of the integration solution in a coordinated manner is essential. Each of the parties should be able to design their discrete piece and simply fold it into the broader solution. The other members of the project team should be able to easily understand the work others have done and should be able add their input and comments. Team members that have moved onto other projects should be able to easily move back into an active role.

So beyond these team development capabilities what does a collaborative approach to integration really mean? Over the new few weeks I will be exploring the 5 capabilities of a collaborative integration platform. This exploration should shed some light on the direction we are headed with our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight. So watch for my next post as we drill down on the first capability; Reusability.

The Changing Role of the Partner in Cloud Integration

The advent of Cloud computing and the availability of cloud based business applications like CRM is dramatically changing the IT environment for companies of all sizes. The Cloud offers simplification…simplification of the user experience and simplification for those responsible for managing the applications itself. It enables companies to get to value faster with their IT investments, allowing them to focus less on technology issues and place more attention on redefining and streamlining their business processes. At the same time, the rapid adoption of the cloud is also accelerating the need for data integration. The cloud has resulted in an explosion of data coming from employees, customers, partners, and influencers. Companies that can integrate, assimilate, and make sense of that information across the enterprise will be the winners.

A number of our partners are responding quickly to this changing landscape. They are transforming large portions of their practices from doing traditional "systems integration" towards creating industry or vertical market solutions that establish a new differentiation for their companies in the marketplace. Not only do these solutions offer built in application functionality inherent to the industry but also include pre-defined integration processes to a number of different cloud and premised based endpoints. Scribe is responding to this changing environment for our partners as we build out our new Scribe Online cloud-based integration service platform. This service is being designed to allow these partners to easily and profitably package, market, and deploy pre-packaged solutions to their target customers. We are also building in a number of collaboration features into the platform to ensure that all parties that have a role in the customer's project, ISV, solution provider, consultant, internal IT, etc. are able to work effectively and efficiently together.

Over the coming months you will hear a lot about Scribe Online and the new innovations we are bringing to market around data replication, migration, and integration…and we want to hear from you. If you are a partner, how is the shift towards cloud computing changing your business? What impact is the cloud having on your relationship with your customers? Are you investing or divesting in certain areas? What strategies or approaches are you using the transform your business? How does integration fit into your business strategy? If you are a customer, what types of partners are you looking for to help you implement your IT investments? How are the relationships with your partners changing? How do you plan on bringing together your cloud and premised based applications? What do you see as the biggest challenges in rationalizing your hybrid computing environments?

We look forward to the conversation.