SalesForce integrated on-demand sales

SalesForce™ is a CRM, Cloud Computing and SaaS market leader. Imaginea's client is a renowned on-demand (SaaS) Sales Configuration company, whose on-demand, guided selling applications encompass the quoting, configuration and proposal generation processes. Nearly 75% of its customers use SalesForce.

Imaginea's engineering team developed a robust integration framework to work with SalesForce, Oracle™ CRM On-Demand and Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM. This framework was used to streamline the entire opportunity-to-quote-to-order process, within the SalesForce CRM interface that was familiar to users.

Highlights

1. Imaginea used a number of SalesForce SOAP APIs for exchange of data -items, extended descriptions and quotes - the most common entities synched between the application and SalesForce
2. XSLs were used to transform application specific XMLs into SalesForce specific format and vice versa. Imaginea provided an API to help application administrators define these XSLs.
3. Using SOAP Save/Synch, the team ensured that the application automatically updates SalesForce Opportunity with Quote and Product Line Item information for accurate reporting of the relevant sales figures.
4. The development team from Imaginea also built features to integrate the application with SalesForce based on various actions. For example, users can update Opportunity in SalesForce after submitting a quote in the application for approval.
5. Some SalesForce customers wanted to use only the customer's Configurator, and not the other applications. So, the Imaginea team enhanced the integration framework to publish configuration XMLs (transformed by XSLs) to WebMethods™ .
6. Some of the SaaS application's customers had to synch millions of items with SalesForce. Imaginea solved these performance issues by making significant enhancements to the application's DB framework by adding JDBC batch updates and DB merges; and by adding intelligent merge capabilities to locate genuinely modified records and only update those modified records.

Imaginea ensured that the customer's application was deployed properly in SalesForce AppExchange™ and was voted the best by customers using these applications. The client added forty-six new customers last year, adding to its list of 170 companies with over 70,000 customers from various industries.