Dreamforce 2015 offered lots to love, from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's crazy shoes to Stevie Wonder's opening set... and, on a more business-related note, the appearance of collaboration solution providers. Case in point: Unify was at this month's event, with CTO Stefan Ried offering partners, customers, and a few analysts an update on the company's flagship collaboration application, Circuit.
Front and center were two different Salesforce integration scenarios based on the open APIs of the Circuit collaborative platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution.
The first is a Salesforce extension leveraging a new Circuit Extension Framework. This native Circuit extension runs on an application node hosted on the Heroku cloud application platform acquired by Salesforce in 2010. The Circuit Salesforce extension can capture and filter business events, such as new or changed leads or opportunities from Salesforce, and turn them into Circuit conversations that automatically notify the relevant people.
Watch the video below for an example showing notifications sent for selected sales opportunities that exceed $2,000. In this scenario, when a salesperson inputs an opportunity into Salesforce that exceeds a certain threshold, Circuit automatically notifies the manager of the new lead to clarify the right actions to take. Likewise, updates to the lead would create a notification in Circuit -- for example, the lead value increasing to $4,000 or the probability of close increasing.
As shown in the graphic below, the extension allows businesses to combine communications and business events as well as relevant documents. (Circuit also integrates with file-sharing service, Box.) The Circuit Salesforce extension is currently in preview, with availability of full source code expected via the developers.circuit.com site in November.
For the second Salesforce integration Ried discussed, he pointed to Informatica, which is one of the market leaders in the Salesforce.com ecosystem, with more than 3,500 customers. In its Dreamforce booth, Informatica showed how the Informatica Cloud Integration connects any Salesforce Cloud to external cloud and on-premises applications with pre-built native connectors. As Ried explained, "Many enterprises don't like to develop custom integrations on the coding level, even if the APIs are powerful. They like to have an easy-to-use middleware cloud service."
Informatica's Salesforce-Circuit integration demo highlighted a common situation in a sales cycle. Often sales reps schedule meetings with prospects directly in Salesforce.com. Most meetings are not held in person but remotely, and a lot of time is spent in creating calendar invites and assigning telephone bridges and screen sharing sessions, often using several different tools. The Informatica-powered integration can automatically create a Circuit conversation and send a calendar invite including the WebRTC video link and traditional dial-in links to the participants of meetings scheduled in Salesforce.
Much has been discussed on No Jitter and in the industry at large about the need for the integration of communications into enterprise applications. Given the broad adoption of Salesforce in the sales automation, sales and marketing arenas, Unify Circuit's tight integration to business events generated by Salesforce applications seems like a powerful place for businesses to start making the dream a reality.
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