Burlington, Ont.-based eBridge Software is adding the ability for Salesforce.com shops to easily extract data into its Web-based eBridge ePortal.
The company, which officially made the announcement earlier this month, said the Force.com integration application will streamline data input and order processing between Salesforce.com and its flagship data exchange and integration platform. The ePortal application is used to connect trading partners, Web stores, back office financial systems or external business systems together.
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Dave Malda, sales and marketing manager at eBridge, said his company has seen a growing disconnect between accounting packages, ERP systems and other propriety CRM business systems.
“We’re basically an integration platform and by connecting your accounting package to your business systems, we’re reducing errors, drop ship times and the other critical items that can appear in this process,” he said.
For enterprises with large global sales teams, the ability to pull up an inventory “on-demand” is essential, Malda said. “With this addition, you could be pulling that inventory data from the accounting package and populating that up into Salesforce,” he added.
Malda said the demand for Salesforce integration was strong, which included feedback from a nice base of Canadian customers.
One eBridge customer, he said is using the Salesforce integration for their invoicing. But instead of using Salesforce to enter in an opportunity or a job, they use eBridge to pull that data down into their accounting package and do all of their invoicing and billing through that mechanism.
In the past, Malda said, the company had a full-time clerk keying in all of this information from Salesforce — which was both time consuming and prone to error.
George Goodall, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group Ltd., said the Salesforce integration is a good one for both the company and its customers.
“This has been a problem among large enterprises for a long time,” he said, referring specifically to companies which have been involved in big acquisitions and have a variety of disparate systems.
The sticking point for some organizations, Goodall said, will be overcoming their fear of moving data through the cloud. This will be a particularly large concern for companies dealing with lots of compliance and regulation issues, he added.
In addition to the Salesforce.com functionality, eBridge allows customers to integrate with over 37 accounting packages including, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Intuit, and SAP Business One. The company said users can also connect with eCommerce storefronts including Magneto, Miva Merchant, Nexternal, and hundreds of other electronic data interchange (EDI) trading partners.
