It’s darn near impossible to build a website today without needing to integrate it with some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. From Siebel to Salesforce.com to custom in-house solutions, CRMs have migrated from enterprises down to businesses of all sizes. The website and the CRM system need to share critical pieces of data in order to allow customers to maintain their own profile, while also giving internal teams the ability to provide the best customer experience available.

Because Application Programming Interfaces (API) have become so prevalent, keeping these two parties talking is doable. An API is like providing software with a phone that can receive calls to tell software to exchange data or execute commands.

The problems with APIs is they usually just sit there waiting for someone to call. Just because two separate programs have phones doesn’t mean they can call each other. One program has to learn - or be programmed - to dial the other. It also needs to know what data and commands to send over the line in order to receive back the proper response. It’s one of natures most fundamental processes.

What this means to the business is you are going to be changing code on either a sophisticated web application, or on an even more complex CRM system. In turn, this means developer costs, quality control testing and potential bugs can be introduced into one or more of these systems. Think of it as, Websites are from Mars and CRM systems are from Venus.

Enter data replication. Think of data replication as software’s match making friend. Data replication has a little black book of phone numbers and the notes on how to speak the other’s language. However, in this relationship, data replication doesn’t just setup the call and walk away. No, he sticks around logging the results, interpreting the responses and making sure no fights break out over who said what or who’s not being attentive to the other’s needs.

Sure, now every time the two pieces of software need to get together, data replication has to be there…in the middle…on a schedule. Awkward. But neither party is trying to be changed. Neither has to bend to the will of the other. No compromises. And if anything does go wrong, everyone can look at data replication to see how, when and where.

Now for the cheesy classified ad for data replication services, “Sound like a relationship you looking to create? Visit our Data Replication Engine page to learn how data replication can get your software together.”

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.