Case study:

Integrating CRM and ERP Applications with IBM Web Sphere Cast Iron Cloud computing has become a business evolution which is impacting all facets of business nowadays, comprising sales, marketing, manufacturing, quoting, ordering, finance, service, and email. Companies want a full picture of their customers, one that’s produced from CRM, particularly sales, marketing and customer engagement service, and ERP, which comprises the financial status of customer accounts, supply chain information and even warehouse management data. All of this includes helpful information for engaging with customers.

For many years, cloud business intelligence was primarily the domain of startup vendors providing Software as a Service (SaaS) BI tools as alternatives to the traditional on-premises software sold by the BI market leaders. However cloud BI is becoming more mainstream as rising numbers of corporate users embrace the cloud computing and SaaS models as part of their business intelligence strategies.

As each function moves to the cloud, it needs migration and integration. In addition, each vendor which gives a cloud solution makes its own interface to the application. This fact makes a challenge in IT organizations of companies of all sizes and locations as they attempt to understand and then manage these unique application interfaces and integrate applications from cloud to cloud and cloud to on premise.

An integration solution should bridge the gap between the on-premise existing systems and new cloud applications, platform, and infrastructure, giving a rapid and easy-to-use method of setting up the integrations as one of the biggest advantages of cloud-based services is the ability to roll out application access to employees anywhere at any time, and also take benefit of new functionality that cloud-based providers can frequently deliver more quickly than is possible with in-house CRM and ERP systems.

IBM WebSphere Cast Iron gives a solution which meets the challenge of integrating cloud applications with on-premise systems, cloud applications-to-cloud applications, and on-premise to on-premise applications. The WebSphere Cast Iron environment focuses on the business requirements, the applications and the business user requirements, while eliminating the daunting complexity of integration.

By using the WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration for a simplified experience, midsized and large companies attain some benefits: Companies can connect their hybrid world of private clouds, public clouds and on-premise applications in days due to the simple “configuration, not coding” approach; it as well offers Integration to a comprehensive set of preconfigured Template Integration Processes (TIPs) for the most common integration scenarios between popular cloud and on-premise applications. Such TIPs remove the need to build integrations from scratch and further accelerate their implementation times.

The configuration-based approach and TIPs help companies decrease integration costs; Built-in connectivity to common applications and decreases maintenance costs of hand-coding changes as the application providers update their APIs. Built-in exception handling and error notifications significantly decrease monitoring and management costs. Additionally, companies can sometimes decrease licensing costs to back-office applications for cloud users by providing real-time access to this information in the cloud.

The visual user interface and the simplified configuration experience decrease the need to use expert resources for cloud "plumbing" projects. They as well permit companies to reallocate such expert resources on more strategic innovation-oriented integration projects. With WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration, cloud users no longer waste precious time logging on or searching in multiple applications to access critical business information. Rather, they get real-time visibility of data in the cloud and maximize their productivity. Since of this productivity improvement, user adoption rises and companies can maximize the value of their investments in the cloud applications.

One kind of integration where WebSphere Cast Iron is of benefit is when to synchronize account records between an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system and a cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) system. If a company just procured the CRM system (such as from salesforce.com) and require to synchronize the master list of customers and other business critical data with the company ERP system (like from SAP). The challenge is to accomplish this essential integration without embarking on a lengthy, costly and complex project cycle which needs specialized skill sets and multiple moving parts to install and maintain.

The WebSphere Cast Iron solution gives an approach to integrating applications that doesn’t need any programming knowledge. The CRM system is intended to be used by the call center and the sales teams to communicate with their customers.

To work with CRM system, account data is required. This account data is available in SAP however should be transferred into salesforce.com. Likewise, customer information that is available in salesforce.com must be transferred to SAP.

WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration is mainly used to keep the data of the two systems synchronized. The account data is available in SAP however should be transferred into salesforce.com. In this scenario, an orchestration is mainly used to synchronize new and updated customer data from SAP into salesforce.com.

Required:

problem 1: What are the advantages obtained by companies who bought IBM WebSphere Cast Iron?

problem 2: Describe what do you mean by Software as a Service (SaaS).

problem 3: How does the cloud ERP work?

problem 4: From the case study how could IBM WebSphere Cast Iron implement security? Validate your answer.

problem 4: According to you, why records require being synchronized between the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system?

problem 5: Describe, with illustrations from the case study, how legacy systems have been used.

problem 6: Clarify on the concept of SAP.