For the second consecutive year, Informatica is proud to participate in Bluewolf’s The State of Salesforce report. I am particularly delighted because the imminent release of the report not only marks the culmination of months of hard work, but the process delivered a rich buffet of information for a bonafide data-junkie like me. Personally, it’s been a pleasure to work with the Bluewolf team and it’s been fascinating watching the answers pour in from thousands of respondents. The most satisfying activity however, was trolling through the findings looking for new insights about the current state of the Salesforce community.

Now in its fourth year, The State of Salesforce report is the definitive guide for how companies use Salesforce: where leading companies are allocating resources, and where cloud industry hype meets hard realities. The report also has an enviable position of being able to track longitudinal trends in the CRM space and serves as fantastic tool to compare your own Salesforce usage against industry benchmarks.  

Did we find a statistic that would make Nate Silver shout “I TOLD YOU SO"? Well, companies are still deriving value from their Salesforce systems and many are continuing to build on their success. However, a staggering 76% still struggle with integration and data quality. And that really surprised me.  

I know data integration has been a perennial initiative, but I would not have guessed that three quarters of respondents still cite it as a problem. Yet I thought more about it: it’s been years since Salesforce was a single application and it has grown far beyond its humble CRM beginnings to become the leading enterprise cloud platform. And the expansion shows no sign of slowing. Just last year we saw Salesforce introduce Analytics Cloud and in the past few weeks they launched their first vertical application, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. 

As the number of Salesforce clouds have grown, so too has worldwide adoption. Again, if we look to The State of Salesforce report for a data point it tells us that the percentage of companies using three or more Salesforce Clouds has more than doubled since last year. Of course, with more clouds come more users — and more users create more data. And, more data means more integration difficulties. Once again the data confirms that trend, as 70% of Salesforce users have to enter the same data into multiple systems. So I guess it’s not that surprising that companies are still struggling to aggregate, consolidate, integrate, share and ultimately analyze their Salesforce data. 

For more information about Salesforce cloud integration and data quality please visit Informatica or talk to your Bluewolf advisor.

The final question I’m sure you’re all asking is “When can I get my hands on this years State of Salesforce report?” Like many things it’s making its debut at Dreamforce — but you can get an early release digital copy by signing up here. And if you are at Dreamforce you can get your hard copy at the Bluewolf or Informatica booths in the Moscone North hall.