Support Salesforce with a Data Warehouse to Improve Business Operations and Decisions
Many businesses have adopted Salesforce as a key business information system. Integrating data from other business applications into Salesforce provides a 360-degree view of the customer, giving everyone the ability to access important data and make better decisions faster. But organizations are also finding that storing everything in Salesforce has a downside. Firstly, there is a financial cost. Secondly, reporting and analysis in Salesforce is not as flexible as a purpose-built BI tool like Tableau or PowerBI. The question for businesses is how to efficiently offload that data to reduce the cost and also improve analytical capabilities.
When it comes to using Salesforce, there is a cost-benefit calculation. How much data should a company store in Salesforce, and for how long? For relevant, pertinent, customer-centric data, Salesforce is the right place for the data. However, storing all business data in Salesforce is more often than not, the incorrect decision.
Salesforce is an application that is optimized for transactions and not for analysis. For many years organizations have been using data warehouses as a specialized tool for storing large amounts of data from various sources of information so that the data can be organized in a way that makes analysis easier. Commonly, data warehouses are architected in a star-schema or multi-dimensional format as these formats enable more complex analysis and reporting than typical operational databases like Salesforce allow.
A data warehouse allows operational data to be stored and analyzed, alongside non-operational data such as emails and marketing information from platforms such as Hubspot or Marketo . Business analysts and decision-makers can use this information to gain a broader understanding of opportunities and risks than straight operational data from Salesforce.
Some operational data can be more cost-effectively stored outside of Salesforce. For example, email attachments with large PDF's can use up a considerable amount of storage space in Salesforce. Offloading those emails to an external database can significantly reduce Salesforce data storage and therefore reduce costs. By using Salesforce Connect, the emails and other data can still be accessed in real-time in response to a Salesforce event or user query.
The cost of Salesforce storage is high compared to other database platforms. So unless there is a critical need, offloading non-essential data from Salesforce to a data warehouse has financial benefits.
In addition, the cost of a Salesforce user can be expensive if the only reason someone uses Salesforce is to report or analyze a portion of the data.
Salesforce is not designed to handle complex reporting and analytics. While basic Salesforce reports and widgets are quite useful at first, as information needs become more sophisticated it is increasingly difficult to get the information needed in a way that can help with decision making.
That is what data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) tools are for. Common use cases for data warehouses are combining data from multiple sources, creating custom reports, holding data for historical purposes, and uncovering trends.
The volume of data that businesses are creating is increasing annually. Some of that information is created and used for operational purposes. But there is a lot of business information that, if made easily accessible, could be valuable for analysis and understanding of longer-term or deeper business issues. Getting that data and transforming it into a format to make analysis easier is a major challenge.
The Synatic Hybrid Integration Platform enables your organization to more efficiently access on-premises and cloud-based information that can be consolidated in the Synatic data warehouse. The Synatic data warehouse is built right inside the Synatic solution, or of course you can use a separate warehouse such as Snowflake. The platform streamlines and simplifies the process of maintaining up-to-date information in the data warehouse so that the business can ensure it gets the benefits from the information in the data warehouse.
The process of populating a data warehouse involves three steps.
These three steps require different expertise and knowledge which add to the costs and challenges of maintaining a data warehouse.
By using the Synatic Hybrid Integration Platform these three steps can be combined into a single data platform, reducing data processing, eliminating the staging area with its associated costs, and rationalizing skills. Synatic allows a company to build the BI data layer in a data warehouse that supports the Salesforce environment.
Source extraction: Synatic's major advantage is its ability to easily integrate and manipulate data. The Synatic data automation technology enables batch and real-time integration patterns using connectors, standard out-of-the-box components that can be used for integration. These make it much easier and quicker for developers to build and perform data extraction from source databases and applications. Synatic Flows enable developers to create, orchestrate and deploy data automations using a graphical user interface and drag-and-drop functionality which makes managing multiple integrations simple and fast.
Staging: The Synatic’s Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) handles data transformation and augmentation in-flow making the process of validating data, altering data, and detecting errors easier. This means that Synatic can fully replace staging databases. Buffers are a Synatic technology that provide warehousing capabilities. Synatic utilizes this capability to store and perform in system transformation of the data, or to persist the data. Buffers allow data in any format to be cached, queried and manipulated in a persisted or temporary store.
Loading: Data stored within Synatic’s Buffers can be loaded in bulk, and specifically load data that has changed, obviating the need for repetitive and costly data reloads. As the volume and variety of data that needs to be loaded increases, Synatic can easily scale to handle increasing data volumes and varieties.
While Salesforce does a great job of improving operations by providing a full view of customer interactions, the information stored in a data warehouse can help to discover insights that can have a significant impact on the business.
With Synatic, businesses can enjoy the advantages of using both types of data storage, Salesforce and a data warehouse, and eliminate the complexities and costs associated with data extraction, staging and loading that many organizations experience. Synatic streamlines and simplifies the process of maintaining up-to-date information in the data warehouse so that the business can ensure it gets the benefits from the information in the data warehouse.
To learn more about how businesses can leverage the power of intelligent warehousing contact Synatic today.
