Stratus Uses the Force.com API to Integrate Salesforce CRM and Oracle Financials On Time and Under Budget

Stratus Technologies took the long road to on-demand CRM. Before deploying Salesforce CRM, the company wrestled with an on-premise Siebel CRM system that the sales staff never embraced. After two frustrating years, with ROI and cost containment headlining its agenda, the company scrapped the system and turned in-house, developing a homegrown application that focused on forecasting.

"We play in an extremely demanding, no-nonsense market," explains Larry Humphreys, CRM manager for Stratus, a Maynard, Massachusetts-based firm that, for more than 25 years, has produced enterprise servers and provided system integration and other consulting services for organizations such as 911 dispatch centers, police and fire departments, stock exchanges, airline operations, and manufacturing firms. "It's critical to have timely and accurate information throughout our sales and production process. It's the basis for how well we compete."

But the homegrown application wasn't integrated globally. Stratus' Oracle Financials ERP system held the hardware customer information, but Stratus' service customers were invoiced in another system. Meanwhile, partner information was in a partner database and support data was in another homegrown system. Although the forecasting application tried to roll up these silos into a single view, reports revealed conflicting numbers. Weekly forecasting meetings often degenerated into sessions in which executives wasted time deciphering inconsistent figures-time that was intended for discussing strategy, key opportunities, and support needs.

It was time for the global solutions provider, which bills itself as "the world's most trusted provider of computer products, services, and technologies," to find a trusted solution of its own.

"We want 'one synchronized machine,' so we can capitalize on revenue opportunities and service customers with the same standard with which they service their own," explains Humphreys. "We needed to tie our business processes together. We had silos of information throughout the sales regions, and the fragmentation undermined the efficiency we were striving for in the field. We needed one integrated, sales-focused business system."

Benefits of a Flexible System

In June 2004, Humphreys and a small engineering team led by Scott Melick, senior systems analyst for IS applications at Stratus, set out to implement a new CRM solution. The executive team wanted a system implemented within 60 days. It had to be cost-effective, user-friendly, and intuitive-three requirements the Siebel CRM—now owned by Oracle—had failed to meet. The solution also had to integrate with back-office systems, particularly the company's Oracle ERP applications.

Stratus considered solutions from salesforce.com, Siebel, NetSuite, and SalesNet. It wanted a cloud-computing model, and Salesforce CRM emerged as the top choice, because of its ability to merge every aspect of the sales process into what Humphreys calls "one real-time instrument panel." Improving forecasting capabilities was the fundamental driver of the integration project between the Oracle applications and Salesforce CRM. On the one hand, Stratus' finance department wanted to be able to base its forecasts and resource allocations on the actual pipeline information that salespeople were entering into the Salesforce CRM system. On the other hand, sales management wanted to use Salesforce CRM primarily to manage the sales teams themselves. The project requirements were straightforward: 

• To improve forecasting accuracy, the finance department had to have a version of the Salesforce CRM pipeline data that it could reorder according to its own territory and market segmentation hierarchies.
• To increase sales efficiency, salespeople had to have visibility from within Salesforce CRM into the existing order information in the Oracle Financials system and an integrated opportunity-to-quote-to-order system. 

The Force.com Solution

Stratus' solution was to replicate the Salesforce CRM opportunities data into a local, on-premises database. Financial information from Oracle Financials was then appended to this Salesforce CRM data. This effectively created a unified data model based on opportunities that finance could use for forecasting and which would also be available to the homegrown order management system known as ftQuote. Once an order is approved, the system updates and locks down the information in both Salesforce CRM and the Oracle system.

Stratus built the integration with Adobe ColdFusion (formerly Macromedia). "Everything is seamless," says Melick. "Our integration is at the order opportunity level. We pass opportunity information to ftQuote, our ColdFusion-based quoting tool. When the order is submitted, this information is passed on to the Oracle ERP applications. Then, when the order number is created, it is passed back to Salesforce CRM."

The key to Salesforce CRM's integration capabilities is the Force.com application programming interface (API), a Web services interface that provides direct, low-level access to all data stored in Salesforce CRM. Based on open Internet standards, the Force.com API allows developers to access Salesforce CRM from within virtually any programming language, development environment, or integration tool. Using the Force.com API, customers can import and export data from Salesforce CRM to ERP systems, deliver real-time sales and support information to company portals, and populate critical business systems with customer information. (For additional technical details of the Oracle ERP applications/Salesforce integration, see the "Salesforce/Oracle ERP Integration" sidebar in the PDF version of this case study.)

Salesforce CRM exceeded expectations from the start. "The first version of the integration was written in just under two weeks," notes Melick, whose team beat the implementation deadline by eight days, with only four IT professionals. "We delivered the deployment well under our budget and right on time. Salesforce CRM cost us one third of the cost of a similar Siebel deployment, and we get additional modules without the incremental cost."

Gone are the days of information silos and disjointed systems. Salesforce CRM and the Oracle applications synchronize data every 15 minutes around the clock, and real-time sales activity is constantly integrated with marketing campaigns, supply chain management, production, and Stratus' finance and legal operations. "The Force.com API is so clean and intuitive that the Oracle integration was painless," says Melick.

ROI and the Future

Since deploying Salesforce CRM, Humphreys says, Stratus' sales cycle has shortened. Lead conversion, which used to take weeks to months, now takes as little as a day. Sales reps get a jump-start on an account within hours, and because the sales process is tied into every key element of the company's operations, executing deals is quicker and more efficient.

User adoption was almost instantaneous, even before global sales training concluded. As the company leveraged Force.com to execute additional phases of integration, such as synchronizing Salesforce CRM with professional services and legal functions, user acceptance expanded. Today, the company utilizes 170 seats, and almost half are occupied by nonsales professionals. Melick says that Stratus continues to rely on Force.com to tie critical functions into Salesforce CRM. For example, the company has integrated all of the forms on its Web site with the AppExchange API, allowing it to place forms in front of assets such as white papers and then feed this activity into Salesforce CRM without creating duplicate records. The ability to integrate with Salesforce CRM is now a standard requirement for all new business applications that Stratus purchases.

"Having one integrated instrument panel validates our efforts every step of the way," Humphreys says. "Salesforce CRM gives us constant visibility into our sales process. We know where we're getting leads, how quickly we're closing deals, and how efficiently we're executing orders. We know when we're spending money wisely, such as tying sales to marketing campaigns and verifying supply chain efficiency. Finally, there's synergy between the sales department and the overall business."

visit Stratus Technologies