COMPANY: Analog Devices is a $2.6 billion a year semiconductor firm.

BUSINESS: Analog Devices works with worldwide customers to custom design and manufacture analog and digital integrated circuits (ICs) for industrial applications, medical and scientific instrumentation, communications equipment, computers, and consumer electronics devices.

CHALLENGE: Because the company had so many product lines, its sales teams were forced to spend too much time handling administrative details. To be useful, the CRM system would need to integrate account and product master data from Analog Devices’ SAP system, which serves as the master source of customer and product data for the company. Analog Devices wanted to make this data available in salesforce.com to simplify the process of creating and tracking new sales opportunities while eliminating duplicate data entry.

IMPLEMENTATION: Analog Devices worked with five technologies: salesforce.com, the AppExchange Web services API to salesforce.com, WebMethods for EAI, SAP, and the Tivoli Maestro package for job scheduling. Analog selected the WebMethods product because it was already used internally for other integration projects.

CUSTOMIZATION: salesforce.com.com Professional Services helped Analog Devices implement the system, making it possible to achieve a three-month deployment cycle to 700 users, a number that was later increased to 800 sales professionals.

EXTENSIONS: To provide support users, Analog Devices signed up for salesforce.com. Premier Support, which includes a priority phone queue, 24/7 live phone support, and weekly phone calls. This service provides an assigned salesforce.com customer service representative (CSR) who is versed in Analog Devices’ specific implementation.

ANALYSIS: This engagement provides a role model in two key areas:

• Back-end integration. For years, the big ERP vendors (SAP, Oracle, etc.) have been touting the notion that CRM must be an extension of a larger ERP system if the CRM system is to have access to the various corporate data repositories stored inside the ERP database. The ERP vendors excused the fact that their ERP-based CRM applications were awkward and difficult to use on the grounds that ease of use was less was less important than offering the sales team a single, coherent view of the customer data. That argument was weak five years ago, because in most cases the CRM application offered as part of the ERP system was just a piece of tacked-on software anyway, relabeled as an “integrated” part of the system. But today, the ERP argument is completely ludicrous because for more than a decade data access standards have been in place to allow multiple applications from multiple vendors to access and update the same data. So it was perfectly logical to take an easy-to-use CRM system and refit the back-end to access an SAP database.

• Support strategy. The one limitation of having multiple applications from different vendors access the same database is that such heterogeneous systems require additional support. Because development of the application doesn’t proceed in lockstep, there’s a slightly higher likelihood of problems cropping up in the production implementation. The best way to limit this risk is to always purchase the highest level of support, so that appropriate resources are always available to insure that the customization and integration continue to work as originally implemented.