Judi Sohn on what APIs mean to her
Judi has a nice run down of how she has three technology systems supporting her organization: GetActive, Salesforce.com, and OpenAir. To integrate GetActive and Salesforce, she does a daily manual export of GetActive data, transforms it by hand in Excel, then shoves it into Salesforce. Based on her estimates, she spends about 10 hours a month doing this. She wishes things were simpler:
My best hope is that at some point GetActive and Salesforce will talk
to each other and come up with a common language between their
applications so when a donation comes in and it hits the GetActive
database, an opportunity record is automatically created in Salesforce.
But I’m not holding my breath.
The connection between OpenAir and Salesforce.com is much smoother. Invisible, in fact.
There are a lot of applications out there that do time and expense
management. I picked OpenAir because I was able to implement it within
Salesforce and our folks can get to it and use it with a flick of a tab.
I got to hear the CEO of OpenAir talk in Seattle about 9 months ago. OpenAir is a stand-alone web app for project management, and expense and time tracking. He said they spent 8 developer weeks making it a 3 click install for Salesforce.com. That’s one developer working for 8 weeks solid–not a large investment compared to what it takes to build an app like OpenAir. And now any Salesforce.com customer can attach OpenAir to their Salesforce.com database.
And Judi gets the benefit of that work by OpenAir. She doesn’t have to do manual steps to connect the two systems–they’re already connected. How much is that worth to Judi? Enough to justify the monthly cost of OpenAir. Enough to make her choose it over other lower-cost options out there.
So, who’s going to be the first to invest 8 developer weeks and make their web action center a two click install into Salesforce.com? I have clients who would buy it. They don’t need donor trakcking–they’ve got that already in Salesforce.com. They don’t need email blasting–they’ve got that already integrated with Salesforce.com. Don’t sell them the whole package, just the piece they need–in this example a web action center.
More and more folks are going to be taking the stance that Judi is when talking to vendors:
Tell me how your product is going to fit in the world I’m already living in…then we’ll talk. If you have to have an API to do it. So be it.
Technorati Tags: NPTech, Open_API, Salesforce.com
October 21st, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Thanks, Steve! I should also mention that the good folks at OpenAir gave us an incredible discount on the monthly fee. I don’t believe they have a written policy for working with nonprofits, but my sense is that if you talk to them they’ll work something out. In our case, the product manager donated his own personal time to our implementation because he had a personal connection to colon cancer. How cool is that?
BTW, the entry I wrote is here.
October 21st, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Whoops! Left out that link–it’s fixed now. Thanks for the description of working with OpenAir. We’re in the process of evaluating their solution for our consulting program.