IndigoVision achieves easy integration of salesforce.com

IndigoVision, headquartered in the UK, manufactures advanced IP video security systems. The company operates from six regional centres, in Dubai, Edinburgh, London, New Jersey, São Paulo and Singapore, with sales and support staff in 24 countries. Products and solutions are sold through a network of some 300 authorised system integrators, who provide system design, installation and service.

IndigoVision is growing fast and uses cloud-based salesforce.com applications combined with an SQL-based on-premise financial solution from Access UK Limited.

Susan McIntosh, Manager, Information Systems, at IndigoVision, explains, “We use salesforce.com to provide opportunity management and sales workflow. With teams around the world, this cloud-based solution is ideal for both our management team and sales and support teams.

“However, with on-premise financial systems, we found we had gaps in our information flow. For example, when a product return is shipped, our worldwide support team need to know, and that data is held in our on-premise solution. The support team did not have reliable information in salesforce.com to give to customers. Similarly, when a sales order is entered into the financial system, the opportunity in salesforce.com was not always closed, or was closed with incorrect information, which could lead to mis-reporting of our sales pipeline.

“Updating salesforce.com with accurate information was completed manually, with potential for delay and error. As the company grew, it became important to find a way to link the two solutions automatically, to ensure that the salesforce.com data was correct.”

WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration
The IndigoVision team scoured the software industry for ways to push data reliably from the Access application to salesforce.com. In many cases, the data was in slightly different formats, so the solution would have to include some ability to transform content as well as matching fields, while managing synchronisation and updates.

“We recognised that the interface to salesforce.com was pivotal to the organisation,” says Susan McIntosh. “Managing a worldwide company with a small financial team is only possible if you exploit this technology correctly.”

With WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration, customers have the flexibility to deploy their integrations to either a physical appliance, a virtual appliance, or directly into the cloud. IndigoVision selected IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration originally as an appliance and latterly using the IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition.

“WebSphere Cast Iron solves the business issue of integrating our on-premise financial solution with salesforce.com. Because salesforce.com is now automatically updated, the company can work with both applications seamlessly, despite the very different ways in which they work. This approach enables IndigoVision to operate and support global sales teams while retaining its financial accounting processes in-house,” says Susan McIntosh.

WebSphere Cast Iron uses a “configuration, not coding” approach together with preconfigured templates to facilitate rapid integration. The WebSphere Cast Iron engine synchronises salesforce.com sales data such as leads, accounts, opportunities and forecasts.

Susan McIntosh continues, “For example, at IndigoVision, opportunities of less than £5,000 are automatically created in salesforce.com if a sales order arrives for that customer account – and WebSphere Cast Iron contains rules that allow it to match a sales order to an opportunity. It populates salesforce.com with order details, including components and prices, and ensures that data fields, currencies and stock codes – which are held in slightly different formats – are transformed correctly.”

WebSphere Cast Iron manages the synchronisation in real time; as soon as an order is committed in the financial solution, salesforce.com is updated. For larger opportunities with multiple part-orders, IndigoVision has set up business process rules within WebSphere Cast Iron that match the sale to the opportunity, closing off the product lines that have been shipped, and carrying any outstanding lines forward to a new opportunity. As a result of the integration, it is possible to provide from salesforce.com detailed and accurate reports of sales by customer or by product. This information was previously only available in the on-premise finance system.

WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition
To ensure a smooth transition to IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition, IBM recommended Orbital Integrated Solutions, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to fulfil the migration and to provide development services. Orbital focuses on delivering enterprise application solutions based on IBM software, and is fully certified in the WebSphere Cast Iron product range. WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition software provides the same functionality as the physical appliance solution, running in a virtual server.

“Migrating to WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition reduces our operational costs, as we no longer have to maintain a separate appliance and we have released data room space,” comments Susan McIntosh. “Additionally, we are able to take snapshots of the virtual server containing WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition. If the underlying hardware fails, we can simply reinstall the virtual server image on another server, and continue operations with very little service interruption.”

Integrated enterprise with WebSphere Cast Iron
Using WebSphere Cast Iron to integrate its on-premise and salesforce.com applications has enabled IndigoVision to continue on its very high growth path without increasing its administrative costs proportionately. Sales orders have grown almost fourfold while the sales order administration team has remained at four full-time employees, and automated data synchronisation provided by WebSphere Cast Iron saves around one quarter of a full-time employee equivalent in reduced administration workload.

“The biggest intangible benefit is information integration,” says Susan McIntosh. “We can use the salesforce.com reports to look at which partners are growing in sales volumes and opportunities, certain in the knowledge that the data is correct.

“We are building the ability to allow sales teams to run credit limit checks on customers direct from salesforce.com, with WebSphere Cast Iron retrieving the data from the financial systems. WebSphere Cast Iron allows us to securely open up this sensitive data without the need to create special access to the finance systems for the sales people. Most importantly, the WebSphere Cast Iron integration capabilities reduce business risk when accepting new orders, an essential element in helping us to achieve our global growth objectives.”