I ran across this rather interesting press release this morning from TMCNet saying: “FinancialForce.com Announces Out-of-the-Box SAP Integration for Sharing Financial Data.”
All I have to say in this case is kudos to a. salesforce.com b. and especially FinancialForce.com.
This is not an insignificant integration when it comes to the evolution of salesforce.com in particular. Thus, a brief look is in order.
What Does It Actually Do?
First, it is one of the first out of the box back office integrations of substance that started with force.com that wasn’t a complete customization – such as the excellent supply chain application/service developed by the folks at Vetrazzo. This one is a pure and simple integration that comes prebuilt that will can take FinancialForce.com data a.k.a. salesforce.com generated data and put it into SAP Financials. It actually can take financial data being generated through salesforce.com and pass it from the cloud to SAP Financials which of course is on-premise. Actually solving a problem that has been vexing SAP for quite awhile. Apparently, there is a German company called SKYVVA which specializes in integrating cloud and on premise applications and in particular salesforce.com and SAP, which certainly made for a fortuitous partnership with FinancialForce.com.
SKYVVA seems to be a pretty interesting company who seem to at least say and possibly do all the right things. They are focused primarily on pre-built integration objects emanating from the cloud and designed to hook into on premise applications. Essentially they are the successors to what were the EAI – enterprise application integration – purveyors of the 90s and early millennium. They are a company that I’m going to be keeping my eye on. There are others in the SAP ecosystem who do similar things but they for the most part integrate SAP into the more amorphous “cloud.” So for example, SAP All-in-One is integrated with cloud services. But what SKYVVA and FinancialForce.com did is unique – at least as far as I can tell
What Does It Mean?
This is probably a bigger step forward for salesforce.com than it is for SAP though I won’t underestimate the value of it for SAP either…
(Cross-posted @ Social CRM: The Conversation | ZDNet)
Salesforce.com Is Into SAP – Ask FinancialForce is copyrighted by Paul Greenberg. If you are reading this outside your feed reader, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.
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