Enterprise Integration Platform Enables Mission-Critical Cross-Sell Visibility on Day One

Bringing Dell and EMC together for one of the biggest IT mergers in history means extensive integration efforts that will span many months. But the key challenge our team faced even before the merger was complete, was one of the critical business process integrations leading to the launch of Dell Technologies in the marketplace.

We were charged with integrating EMC and Dell’s dual Saleforce.com systems to provide thousands of sales professionals seamless access to data and opportunities across both companies on Day One of our groundbreaking merger. We wanted our sales teams from each company to be able to sell products from both as we officially launched Dell Technologies.

What’s more, bridging the gap between the disparate Salesforce systems was needed to avoid the error-prone inefficiencies of sales reps, account managers, and finance professionals manually reconciling and reporting on data from disconnected systems.

Round peg, square hole

Both companies had different architecture and application programming interface (API) practices in their separate instances of Saleforce.com. Their product data heirarchy was laid out differently. The business process around leads, opportunities and accounts creation was customized for the needs of the respective companies. Melding them into a single set of information that enabled the cross-selling of the many complementary products across storage, server, virtualization and PC was a challenge right out of the gate.

With data format, app and cultural differences, at times it felt like our three-member Enterprise Integration Services team was trying to put a round peg into a square hole. Adding to the challenge was the fact that we had to make the integration happen in six to eight weeks.

We needed an enterprise integration platform that would be intuitive, simple to use, fast and scale to our needs. One that had built-in connectors to bridge applications so we wouldn’t have to write custom code to connect data elements.

We had an integration cloud platform that had proven effective in uniting applications and data in the more than half a dozen acquisitions that Dell had completed before its merger with EMC—Dell Boomi.  Boomi is a multi-tenant, cloud-based application integration platform that has a broad range of built-in connectors to more easily integrate applications and data in IT environments. It serves as a connection between applications whether they are on-premises or off and then manages the integrations in the cloud.

Our previous integrations were nowhere near the scale of the Dell EMC Salesforce.com project. We set the goal of designing the system to handle 5x the expected volume. With 200,000 messages a day as the baseline, we laid out the architecture that was able to support a million messages a day.

We worked with the business to assimilate the data, review business rules, establish use cases and test the consolidated data sets. Ultimately, with weeks of preparation and a two-day move into the integrated platform, our sales teams were able to function as a united force on Day One. The Salesforce.com integration was a huge success!

Building a Connected Business: Lessons learned in the Salesforce integration

If your organization is facing a business integration or merger, here are some strategies we learned along the way that might make the process a bit easier:

◈ Use an iPaaS solution—An Integration Platform as a Service, like Boomi, provides a comprehensive solution for moving, managing and governing information across data applications and data repositories.

◈ Set up a change control process—As with any project, tracking and documenting change management is essential.

◈ Tap subject matter experts (SMEs)–It is extremely important to utilize the knowledge of those on both sides of your integration effort who understand specifics of the business processes and the use cases you are dealing with—for instance, the Quote Creation Process and how it interfaces with SFDC. Guidance from SMEs and the actual end users i.e. sales reps in this case, will save your team the time it takes to get to learn the different processes and avoid costly mistakes.

◈ Clarify legal restrictions up-front—Since our team began working with both companies’ Salesforce systems before the merger was legally completed, we were uncertain what data and tools were accessible and shareable between both sides at what point in time. However, we did discover in post-merger discussions that there we had more access than we thought. It is worthwhile to have discussions with your legal team ahead of time to clarify what is restricted and what is not– to avoid being overly restrictive on data and tool access.

◈ Clean up your data—Integrating data in your iPaaS project is an opportune time for data owners on both sides to clean up their data. Make sure that the content and applications that are being moved into a unified platform are only those that are needed. Working with clean data will make the process faster and more efficient.

Finally, if your organization is facing the challenges and complexities of an iPaaS project to integrate systems, data and applications—most likely complicated by different corporate cultures—take heart. We found that most people—from managers to individual contributors—did their best to help make this collaboration a success despite the hurdles we faced. It can be done!

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Enterprise Integration Portal for One-Stop Tracking of Business Transactions

Tracking integrated business and service transactions across multiple IT systems is important in today’s fast-moving business climate. Being able to track them across two major IT companies (Dell and EMC) that recently merged to form Dell Technologies, one of the largest technology companies in the world, is absolutely vital.

That’s why Dell IT’s recent launch of a visualization tool that lets our business and IT teams use Dell technology to monitor transactions on a single dashboard is a critical step in the EMC/Dell integration.

It is called the Enterprise Integration and Services Business Monitoring Portal (EISBMP), a system that combines cutting-edge Dell technology solutions to bring together all integrated transaction data into a single view where business and support people can see transactions across multiple systems in a comprehensive dashboard.

Accessed via single sign on, the EISBMP has allowed us to consolidate more than 15 different tracking applications into one. It also lets us showcase our Pivotal platform and a range of other technologies across the powerful Dell portfolio that, combined with open-source apps, create this cloud native application.

The first phase of this project, which tracks legacy EMC transactions and serves internal IT customers, was launched in May and currently handles 20 million transactions a day. We plan to extend the portal to include legacy Dell over the next three to four quarters, expanding that volume to 120 million per day as our dashboard expands companywide. We also plan to open the EISBMP to our channel partners to allow business-to-business dashboard access in the near future.

The need for a single view

Like most growing organizations, EMC and Dell had amassed an array of systems and apps used to monitor transactions and support requests across various data bases. Our business and support users would have to check multiple locations to track a transaction from one phase to the next across our organization.

For example, prior to EISBMP, IT might get a call from a sales representative asking for insights into what is happening with a given sales order. Maybe they already confirmed the transaction data had been processed from the SAP database but didn’t know if it ever reached the third-party order fulfillment system we use to ensure our transactions conform to trade compliance regulations. Or they may be looking for its status in Salesforce.com, a third-party customer relationship management app we use.

There was no good portal that gave sales reps insight into what was happening with a given customer order to keep track of its movement across the many systems and tools.

With EISBMP, sales reps, as well as numerous other business users and support providers, can enter the transaction number to see where their customer order is within the business lifecycle.

Our new centralized dashboard tracks transactions for some 1,500 to 1,600 services that we support. And we expect to support another 3,500 services in the near future.

Bringing it all together

When EMC and Dell merged a year ago, the array of systems and platforms on which we processed business and support transactions became even more complex than the already complicated network of processes each individual company was grappling with.

Around that time, our Cloud Native Interactions (CNI) team, part of Dell IT’s Enterprise Integration Services, took on the job of creating a system that would integrate the various data sources and consolidate the various tools for the legacy EMC network.

Our task was to create a framework that would allow our various systems to work together, to connect to each other and exchange data and messages. The goal was to bring everything together in one dashboard.

We began by collaborating with business and support users to understand their needs and planning the high-level architecture we would need to build such capabilities. We then analyzed the kind of tools and technologies we would need to make it work.

My team decided to use Pivotal Spring Framework to build our portal. Not only did using Spring Framework fit into our practice of using our own technology, but it also provided an open-source product that is easy to use and offers standardization.

Technologies we chose include our own Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Gemfire, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Microservices.

The result is a single dashboard that is customizable and offers better insights into our integrated transaction data, which is also easily maintained. Users can search for transactions faster and see their status all in one place. Replacing 15+ apps with just ONE has resulted in significant cost and resource savings.

We are now working on completing the domain requirement to let our business partners access the EISBMP on a business-to-business basis. We are also working to extend the portal to integrate legacy Dell transaction data so that the dashboard will track transactions across the combined company. And eventually, we will offer mobile capabilities so that team members in the field can tap into such real time tracking information.

Overall, our new tool is enabling business and support teams to stay on top of their day-to-day transactions, track and address issues as they arise, analyze companywide metrics and leverage data to improve their performance and stay ahead of industry trends.

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