For those of you using hosted applications as the foundation of your companies day to day business operations, one of the challenges you might be facing is the myriad of applications (both hosted and non-hosted) you have that are not integrated.
Maybe you have QuickBooks, Google Analytics, and HR data in various applications and then a few hosted applications such as Salesforce.com.
Having all of this information separated and not with the ability to bring it together and make useful business decisions is not good.
bMighty writes about a deal between Dell and Salesforce.com “We’re starting to build a bridge for SMB customers — and especially Dell’s SMB customers — to get started with cloud computing,” explained Marc Stein, director of Dell’s SMB cloud strategy.
Stein cited research showing integration as the key pain point for small and midsize businesses, even above cost, and the new program is designed to make it easy to integrate Salesforce.com with almost 100 popular SMB applications, including QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage, ADP, Microsoft Dynamics as well as Oracle and MySQL databases and even homegrown databases. The goal of Dell & Salesforce.com – CRM, Stein said, is to give customers a 360-degree view of their business, from customers, to employees, to billing, to manufacturing and fulfillment.
What does this mean for your business
As your business grows and your use of hosted applications increases it is important for you to integrate the various data streams of your business so you get as a complete and holistic view as possible of your entire business and not just pieces of it.
Ramon Ray is the editor and tech evangelist for Smallbiztechnology.com
