Siemens Energy

Randy Berger from Siemens speaks on his experience with WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Randy Berger. I’m with Siemens Energy, Inc. here in U.S. I’m the Process and Application IT Manager.

At Siemens Energy, we produce equipment that we sell to industrial and utility companies from the generation of the electricity through the power transmission and distribution across the grid.

One of the initial challenges that we had with our integration was we had many ERP Systems that we combined into one and over those years, we had a pent-up demand for integrating with Salesforce.com. At that point, we were looking for an integration partner that would allow us to bring data from our SAP system into Salesforce.com.

One of the primary needs of our business customers was visibility into the data that was in our ERP system. So people that are in the sales organization couldn’t always see or get information out of SAP. So it was a natural fit for us to bring that information from SAP into Salesforce to provide that visibility to our IT customers which are the business users and our sales agents and reps.

One of the unique about our organization is in our IT group, we were very small so we needed to have a solution that we could use without real development. So we used business analysts for the most part to analyze processes and we needed to be able to integrate at a very low level technically, and that’s why Cast Iron was appealing to us.

So one of the things that’s great about Cast Iron solution is because it's real drag-and-drop and very visual, most of our business analysts aren’t very heavy on the code side. So it was a good fit for us. We like to keep things very simple, we like to introduce them at a very low level of complexity, and then we like to expand on that. That’s our CRM strategy with Salesforce and that’s our integration strategy.

When we originally brought Cast Iron in to demo it for us, we had my boss, the CIO, and several other IT folks in the room. And when we saw how easy it was to connect up SAP to Salesforce.com, it was almost a no-brainer and we said, “This is what we want to use.”

So our initial project was a very simple project and we have been expanding ever since. We had three orchestrations at the time that we rolled out within two weeks. Subsequent to that, we continue to roll out to the fact now we have over 150 to 180 orchestrations running on the same development platform.

After we finished the initial connection and we understood how the program worked, it was much easier and faster to connect to other systems together, and it’s our standard platform at this point.

The integrations that we have integrated between Salesforce, SAP, SAP and other systems, Salesforce and other systems, other systems to other systems, so it's a myriad of different applications that we are using to integrate with Cast Iron at this point.

We expanded on it after that to add more functionality because our users saw what the capabilities were and they wanted more.

So the nice thing about this current project is when SAP changes any information, it gets passed in Salesforce and chatter automatically sends a feed out about that, so any of our users that are following that object will then see a feed on it.

My relationship with Cast Iron has been fabulous ever since we started working together in 2007. We have many years of working on their platform, we have gotten great support and we have gotten great results. Our end-users are very pleased with the projects that we have implemented and it’s just been a fantastic go of it and we continue to build out more and more applications every day.

The relationship with Cast Iron and IBM has only strengthened from my executives’ perspective of the stability of the company and the decision we made to go with Cast Iron several years ago.