Salesforce.com is the latest addition to Magic Software’s roster of applications and services it supports through its iBOLT business integration suite.
Magic’s (NASDAQ: MGIC) iBOLT uses a code-free, wizard-based interface to enable users to merge customer data across the enterprise, sharing information between Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) and other business applications, in real time.
The idea is to help users automate business processes in operations, sales, finance, marketing, online advertising, human resources and management — without the effort of a full integration.
For instance, sales users might convert lead data into sales orders or funnel captured lead data directly into Salesforce.com. They also could link e-commerce data to sales forecasts, increase the visibility of past-due accounts and sales pipelines for risk analysis, create a single view of customer purchase history or calculate campaigns’ return on investment.
According to Magic Software, the task of setting up these sorts of integration is made far simpler owing to the design of its platform.
“Our platform is interoperable and metadata-driven,” said Avigdor Luttinger, Magic Software’s vice president of corporate strategy. “We invented a lot of stuff 20 years ago but at the time we didn’t have the right buzzwords. For example, the word ‘metadata’ didn’t exist, so we called it an application knowledge base.”
Magic offers iBOLT as an on-premise installation under a Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing model — an approach similar that of competitors like Cast Iron Systems, in which vendors provide an on-premise integration appliance that is “basically a configured black-box PC,” Luttinger said.
He said Magic eschewed a SaaS-to-SaaS integration solution in favor of an on-premise application that would better address the major obstacle facing customers: the difficulty they faced integrating on-premises with SaaS.
“That’s where the customer pain is the highest and where we can provide solutions that are not only painkillers but actually healers, since a byproduct of our solution would be to render those on-premise applications easier to integrate and at least partially [service-oriented architecture]-enable,” he added.
“Just imagine what it means to be able to integrate a legacy Unix ERP
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Thus far, Magic Software’s message seems to be gaining traction in the marketplace.
Platforms like iBOLT “represent the future of the service-oriented architecture/business process management (SOA/BPM) market, in which powerful and dynamic representations of business process and policy drive applications, and developers don’t have to know the underlying platform APIs to succeed,” wrote Forrester analysts John Rymer, Mike Gilpin, Larry Fulton, Randy Heffner and Jacqueline Stone in a study last July.
While faulting iBOLT for shortcomings in standards support “and some advanced features,” the suite “scored well in built-in tools for user interface and business process management
The iBOLT Progression
The news marks the latest stage in Magic Software’s efforts to offer integration with the biggest players in enterprise software and services.
In 2005, the company launched iBOLT for the SAP ecosystem and, at the end of 2006, iBOLT received certification for SAP’s NetWeaver platform. Luttinger said about 250 SAP partners now work with Magic Software.
“The key is predefined samples of popular processes that people can deploy in a matter of days and enrich their SAP applications,” he said.
Magic Software then began working with JD Edwards, now owned by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).
“We took the same concept and developed a special edition” for JD Edwards, Luttinger said. Magic, he added, has “one of the very few successful platforms … that runs native on the [IBM] AS/400”, which he said a third of JD Edwards’ 6,000 worldwide deployments use.
The latest move came after Magic discovered that many JD Edwards customers “wanted to get hooked into Salesforce … that many Salesforce.com customers were looking to hook that application into existing, on-premise assets and many SAP customers were also interested in integrating with Salesforce,” Luttinger said.
Since Magic Software already had the basic business processes available, “it was easy to hook a special version that exposes the Salesforce.com API
Luttinger added that the platform owes much of its popularity to its simplicity of use, which made it particularly appealing to the small and midsized companies using SAP’s Business One ERP package.
“Many SAP business implementers are not very technical,” he said. “They are more on the consultant/architect level, so the ability to use an integration tool that works on a configuration basis rather than one that makes you write code was very integral to its success.”
