The answer is a definite “Yes”, because as one of the world’s most implemented ERP/CRM packaged solutions for large and medium sized enterprises it suffers from the same metadata challenge as SAP, Oracle, and increasingly Salesforce systems. (According to Panorama Consulting Solutions’ most recent survey,
I saw a fascinating post by David Linthicum on the Informatica Blog recently in which he discussed the Top 3 Data Integration mistakes which companies make and how to avoid them.
We’ve been surprised (pleasantly I might add) at the response we have received to the introduction of Safyr’s capability to reverse engineer metadata from Salesforce systems.
This is the latest in an occasional series of data models based upon the packaged application we support with our Safyr product. It is an example of modelling Salesforce application tables with Safyr.
Well…er…Yes, and No. We get this comment lots of times. It’s sometimes hard to explain the difference. Strictly speaking, we do ‘metadata discovery’. I like analogies.
We’ve been providing a solution to get metadata out of ERP and CRM applications for quite a few years now and a common question over that period has been some variation of: “It’s great what you do for SAP (PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc…) – now tell me, can you do the same for our other packaged apps?”
We’re going to be adding Safyr® for Salesforce capability to our product in the next release (due June 2014) so I wanted to give a taste of what this will deliver.
According to a recent report by leading analyst firm Gartner, heavily customised ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems will have achieved the status of ‘legacy ERP,’ by 2016.
I know, I know I have got that the wrong way round. Well, actually I did it on purpose to illustrate a problem with BI/Data Warehousing projects and incidentally many other Information Management initiatives. That problem is the challenge of source data analysis – particularly with SAP, Oracle and Salesforce packages.
I realise this might be controversial but I do believe it. IT professionals have long talked about Process Modelling as the way to understand what a complex system does, while Data Modelling tends to be seen as the ‘Cinderella’ of the modelling world.
