What benefits do ESBs offer for Enterprise Software CRM systems?

An ESB can bring advantages to a CRM System because it prevents the need for brittle point to point integrations. Assists applications to communicate easier with each system on the bus. It will increase business agility and reduce time to market for new business initiatives. ESB's are easy to customise and will enable specific user requirements. ESB's also assist with trouble shooting from a central dashboard perspective. No custom code is required because it can be configured via the connected ESB.

ESBs enable real time data exchange between disparate applications. These participating applications don’t need to know the data structures supported by the other applications that they are communicating with (relational db, XML, flat files, etc) and rely solely on the ESB to transport and map accordingly with each app that has been preconfigured on the ESB. This reduces the complexities of real time integrations amongst heterogeneous applications and their specific formatting. It enables one to stay away from resource intensive and costly point to point solutions. The more complex and number of heterogeneous apps involved, the greater the ROI.

To summarize, it’s important to differentiate between point-to-point, API, and ESB integration models, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, point-to-point and API integrations can be used as a short-term/tactical solution to address a requirement, while an ESB provides a more strategic and longer-term solution.

A CRM system will be needed to deliver specific customer outcomes, there may be a need for one of the value stream steps to integrate with other systems of records (SOR). Given the integration context, depending on the organization’s maturity and budget, a CRM-SOR integration could be built on an ESB or a point-to-point integration to create, retrieve, update, or deactivate information in the system of records. A Solution Architect would help determine the most appropriate integration solution.

It's crucial to distinguish between personalization, workflows, and integration. In my opinion, personalization is the brain (i.e., AI), integration is the veins, and workflows are the muscle. All three are essential for achieving a successful customer outcome. Other benefits such as reduction of manual errors, vendor lock-in and custom coding follow through if the organisation has a proper implementation methodology.

Here is one additional aspect to consider when choosing an integration platform: The availability of pre-built integration content. The Gartner term is “packaged integration processes” (PIPs for short). Packaged integration processes accelerate, for instance, integrating your particular CRM system with your ERP system. Very likely not a deciding factor in itself, but nevertheless an integration platform selling point worth taking a look at.

Choosing the right ESB for a CRM system must be based on the organization's ESB strategy. Most ESBs have good capabilities to integrate most of the CRM applications with different types of systems. There is no hard rule to using the preferred integration recommendation by CRM. I have seen some customers choosing multiple ESB platforms in the organization to support different applications (ERP, HR, CRM, Data Lake..etc( integration requirements, adding more technical debt. Chose ESB which supports your overall organization requirements and offers prebuilt content, API management capabilities, Hybrid Deployment option, Event mesh capabilities..etc

Here are some business perspectives to consider for a CRM centric ESB: - assess your data mining, analytics & processing needs for requirements such as customer profiling, opportunity assessment, pipeline management etc. - for e.g., a bank would typically view a single customer with multiple relationships as multiple customer profiles thus missing out on their holistic relationship. - an ESB can fetch in real time the total relationship data from disparate systems like cards, loans, deposits, investments, business & savings accounts, besides heads up on any customer pending issues, risks or red flags. ESBs can also pick data from customer's social media profiles and process & propose just in time advisory & upsell recommendations.