This case study demonstrates the benefits of good integration between disparate CRM systems.
Background
Telecity Group plc is a European carrier-neutral datacentre and colocation centre provider. It specialises in the design, build and management of highly connected, resilient and secure environments in which customers can house their telecoms, internet and IT infrastructure. The company operates 37 data centres, centrally located in the key European cities.
They provide data centre and colocation services to financial services companies, cloud service operators and content companies. Telecity Group data centres provide their customers with an environment in which they can outsource their technical, web and IT infrastructure, leaving them free to concentrate on their core business.
Telecity Group data centres host telecoms networks, including fixed line networks, mobile operators, Internet service providers and content distribution networks. These companies use Telecity Group data centres to connect to Internet exchange points, each other and their end customers, such as Internet content companies.
It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired by Equinix in January 2016.
The Challenge
At the time, this company did not have an ESB solution and most of their existing integration was point-to-point, either from their Sales / PreSales CRM Dynamics system talking to their Call Centre CRM system (BMC Remedy) or vice versa. Some integration existed within their SQL Server Integration Services which was connected to CRM Dynamics.
They were in the process of creating a self-service portal for their clients when we started the contract – with the purpose of giving their business clients a view on their customer data, their server and Data Centre statistics and information and to be able raise tickets automatically to the Call Centre department which would need to pass data on these tickets to BMC Remedy, the CRM system.
Another company was contracted to create and go-live with this self-service web portal for them at the time. The top level requirement was to integrate with SCC portal and their defined SOAP Web Services for each of the use cases that needed to be implemented in the portal.
The Solution
Integrella was asked to provide consultancy services for the project. We linked these 3 systems and passed data between the SCC portal, CRM Dynamics (for Sales and PreSales information) and Remedy CRM (for Call Centre incidents and data). The initial requirement was to persist data in the ESB (InterSystems Ensemble) for reporting and to act as a data warehouse for all the flowing data.
Ordinarily where an ESB solution is established in a company, and especially where Web Services are used, the ideal is not too persist data in the ESB but to keep the data persisted in the source and target systems. An alternative might be to persist reporting data into an external database for business intelligence or reporting purposes.
We delivered each of the phases with regards to providing the ESB mechanism which would interact between the SCC Portal, CRM Dynamics and Remedy CRM. There was also a migration of data required from CRM Dynamics for Client data to be persisted into the Ensemble ESB Caché database.
A part of our service was to provide InterSystems Ensemble training to their IT team in order for them to be able to support the infrastructure of Ensemble from a 1st line perspective and also to provide information as to the specific technical areas of the solution to all of the teams involved. The ESB solution was implemented within the timescales. It was a complex project with all of the use cases that needed to be triggered to/from their SCC Portal interacting through Ensemble ESB to/from CRM Dynamics and Remedy.
The project was ready to go live within the deadline. In addition, we also completed the data migration piece incorporated into the project existing timescales.
About Integrella
Integrella is a specialist IT services company with extensive experience across UK sectors. Our services include consulting, development, delivery, support and resourcing. We deliver our solutions by partnering with top vendors in the industry.
The pressure is on every organisation to be more connected, more convenient, more compelling and more social. These needs drive digital transformation. Integrella can help you realise the potential in what you already have – and set you on the right digital track.