Salesforce is known by many as the central hub for managing customer relationships, sales processes and marketing activities. Data within Salesforce is invaluable for organizations—and the ability to connect to data inside Salesforce and integrate data outside Salesforce is key to successful analytics and operations programs. Join us to learn about Maximizing Your Salesforce Investment.
For many organizations, their requirement for Salesforce connectivity leads them to Progress. Progress® DataDirect® is a suite of data connectivity solutions that enables seamless integration between various applications, databases and platforms. Over 10,000 enterprises rely on DataDirect for its high-performant, standards-based connectivity.
A Core “Focus” on Salesforce
Progress holds regular customer focus groups to collect feedback on our connectivity. During these focus groups, time is often spent answering questions like “Why DataDirect” and “Why DataDirect for Salesforce.”
While many reasons have been provided, five were mentioned repeatedly: Reporting and analytics against your Salesforce data, the ability to view and update external data, performance, high availability and detailed logging and auditing support. Let’s dive into each of these Capabilities.
1. Analytics and Reporting Against Salesforce Data
Use your own BI tools instead of Salesforce built-in reporting for analytics and reporting against your Salesforce data. This is possible because many popular BI tools embed the DataDirect Salesforce driver to connect to Salesforce. As for the BI providers that don’t? DataDirect driver splug into almost all BI tools via ODBC to support secure and reliable connectivity to Salesforce data. Both connection methods are effective and do not require the exportation of Salesforce data to a warehouse. This means that DataDirect users can report in real time, against live Salesforce data.
2. Viewing and Updating External Data from Within Salesforce Applications or Reports
This functionality is possible by leveraging Salesforce Connect, a feature in Salesforce that enables the usage of OData to connect to external data. DataDirect for Salesforce can OData- enable a wide range of data sources. These include everything from the relational databases you would expect, such as PostgreSQL, SQL Server and Oracle, to others like Hive, Google BigQuery and even REST sources. This allows organizations to view real-time external data within Salesforce. Not only do you save money by not paying to relocate and store that data in Salesforce, but you’re also working with a single source of truth. No more stale data!
3. Performance
When accessing data for BI and analytics projects, performance is essential. DataDirect was designed with this in mind, and our connectivity drivers are among the most performant on the market. We achieve this by returning only the required data, using throttling controls to minimize the impact on the backend data source and leveraging best-in-class JDBC drivers to reduce CPU and memory consumption.
4. High Availability
High availability and fault tolerance are critical for organizations that need always-available systems and performance that’s unaffected by system failures. DataDirect provides support for cluster installations, horizontal scaling and industry-standard load balancing—facilitating the overall performance and availability of the system.
5. Logging and Auditing Support
Detailed logging and auditing are essential for tracking and monitoring user activities and changes made by individual users. DataDirect provides a full SQL audit on a per-user basis to monitor all activities and provide insights into data usage and user activity, which can help optimize performance and enhance security.
DataDirect in Action
A standout example of DataDirect supporting an organization’s Salesforce investment involves a leading cloud provider that had a customer in need of real-time data connections to Salesforce. Since ETL was not a viable option and creating a custom connection was out of the question, both from a cost and time perspective, this cloud provider turned to Progress. Within minutes of installing DataDirect drivers, the cloud provider created an OData-based REST API connection for Salesforce to consume without months of development. The result? Hundreds of hours saved on labor by not having to pull IT resources off critical projects to create a custom connection. To learn more about DataDirect connectors and how Progress can help you get more out of your Salesforce investment, contact us.
