Sri Bedathur

My post last week about cost savings with salesforce.com led to some interesting conversation off the blog. One of the readers questioned the cost benefit of salesforce.com, particularly the cost of integration, and declared that moving to salesforce from an on-premises system simply moved the integration costs.

I agree to an extent. Moving to cloud doesn’t eliminate the integration costs. Nobody ever claimed it would. Costs do get moved, but those costs are very likely to be significantly less. It has not only been my direct experience but also of several folks I’ve interacted with. And there are of course several case studies here. I don’t have enough reasons to believe they are falsified.

There is no debate about the fact that the days of siloed IT systems are gone. Systems must co-exist and integrate to provide any value. Whether you are in the cloud or not, you are going to have to build integration. As is the case with any technology, Salesforce.com cannot solve every business problem. In fact, it will be a total misfit in certain situations. The key to success is aligning business needs and available technology to deliver the optimum solution for your specific needs. More likely than not, this solution involves multiple technologies, and how they integrate can prove to be the real difference between success and failure.

And this is one of the key areas where salesforce.com leads the pack. Just take a look at the number of integration middleware available in the market. And if they don’t meet your specific needs, you can write your own without sacrificing an arm and a leg. More than 50% of the traffic on salesforce.com is integration-related. Force.com API today is one of the most popular APIs around. Not without a reason, I am sure.

Before we get too hung up on the cost factor, a word of caution: The real role of IT in any enterprise is not of saving costs for the company. Just like any support service, its primary role is to provide tools and technologies that make the users more efficient and more productive so they can help grow business. If you are picking solutions purely based on cost, you’ve got it all backwards! With salesforce.com, the cost benefit is only incidental, a huge added bonus you get because of the way it has been architected.

Way too often, IT departments’ lack of agility proves to be an obstacle for businesses. How many times have you had to wait weeks if not months before your IT department delivered what you asked for? Not because they don’t care, it’s just that they are too busy doing stuff they shouldn’t have to be doing. If this situation is familiar to you, maybe you should seriously consider salesforce.com.