Top 5 Reasons to Use DataDirect with Salesforce

Customers pick Progress DataDirect for Salesforce connectivity because of its security, performance, high availability and more.

Recently, Progress DataDirect held a webcast regarding our connectivity solutions for Salesforce investments. During the presentation, we took a bit of a different angle and discussed what we hear from our customers as to why they picked DataDirect for Salesforce connectivity.

While there were many reasons stated, five in particular were mentioned over and over, including performance, high availability, security, read-write support and detailed logging and auditing support.

Let’s dive into each one!

• Performance is essential when it comes to accessing data for BI and analytics projects. DataDirect understands this, and our connectivity drivers are among the most performant on the market. We achieve this by returning only the data that is required, using throttling controls to minimize the impact on the backend data source and leveraging best-in-class JDBC drivers to reduce CPU and Memory consumption.
• High availability and fault tolerance are critical for organizations that need to ensure their systems are always available, and performance is not affected by system failures. DataDirect provides support for cluster installations, horizontal scaling and industry-standard load balancing, ensuring the overall performance and availability of the system.
• Security is a top priority for all our customers. DataDirect provides a secure authorization framework for accessing REST APIs, robust and secure authentication and authorization infrastructure, end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, and multi-tenant solutions with granular user access controls.
• Read-write support is crucial for organizations that need to maintain a single source of truth and facilitate real-time data integration and streamlined business processes for a single point of data access. DataDirect provides bi-directional data transfer capabilities between Salesforce and other systems.
• Finally, detailed logging and auditing are essential for tracking and monitoring user activities and changes made by individual users. DataDirect provides a full SQL audit on a per-user basis to monitor all activities, as well as insights into data usage and user activity, which can help optimize performance and enhance security.

After the presentation and the demo of the DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline, we opened it up for audience questions. As always, the questions flooded in from our viewers. To list them all would likely make this blog longer than you'd want to read, so let’s summarize the three below that can be considered "frequently asked questions."

How long does it take to get hybrid data pipeline set up and configured?

The process is straightforward, and usually, it takes about a day to set it up, depending on the complexity of the installation. Once you have the environments that you're going to install in, whether it be a Docker environment which we support, or if you're going to be putting it onto a Linux VM either in the cloud or on prem, it will probably take a day to work on it. If you're going to do a multi node installation, it might take a little bit longer because you'll be configuring a load balancer and a backend database. But this is definitely not an extensive installation process that involves an army of consultants.

Can you name a common business case for using DataDirect Hybrid Data Pipeline?

One of the common business cases for using hybrid data pipelines are organizations that have on-prem solutions that have a large amount of data, such as an ERP or some sort of legacy system. They might have millions, or even billions at times, row data that they want to make available in Salesforce for, say, their customer service team to be able to look up historical information. DataDirect has seen this numerous times in customer engagements, and the prospect of migrating all the data into Salesforce is cost prohibitive and time-consuming. So, to be able to access data where it lives is a common business case to be able to solve that problem.

What happens if my organization wants to connect to a source not listed in the product?

For data sources that might not be on our list of connectors that we include, you have a couple of options. You can bring your own JDBC driver, considering we support third party JDBC drivers. These can be dropped in both to the server for directly connecting from the Hybrid Data Pipeline servers or through the on-premises connector. DataDirect also has a product called our Autonomous REST Connector, which is actually built right into the Hybrid Data Pipeline and lets organizations connect to data sources that are behind REST APIs. DataDirect actually has about 50 or so different models to help you connect to sources like Jira or other REST-based sources and makes it really easy to get SQL access to those, or even OData enable them if you desire. Also, if you have internal custom APIs or maybe even public APIs that we don't necessarily have a model for, DataDirect has a user interface that allows you to work through building a configuration to those APIs without needing to write any code.

If you would like to learn more about what we offer for Salesforce, or just about our connectors in general, please feel free to contact us any time.

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