The MultiView sales team was spending a lot of time researching prospects and customers using its CRM system, but also needed information from other systems, such as marketing and lead generation. To free up time for these employees, the company wanted external information to flow into the CRM system automatically. Home-grown legacy infrastructure enabled only limited interchange between applications.

"We also needed to connect Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Dynamics AX, our ERP system," explains Chief Architect Glen Jones. "That's where we store our online advertising inventory, and Sales needs to know exactly what's available in real time so they can provide immediate information to prospects and customers."

MultiView was already planning to consolidate three instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and upgrade to one instance of the on-premises version of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. Both Mr. Jones and Enterprise Application Specialist Roy Martinez saw this as the perfect time to use a new integration solution.

Integrating Dynamics 365 with the marketing system would also pay big dividends. When a marketing campaign is launched, a connection between Dynamics 365 and the marketing platform would allow inside sales to see who is looking at campaign messaging and more easily identify potential leads.

Another important objective of the integrations was a comprehensive view of customers. With multiple systems, the sales team sometimes had to ask IT to write custom queries to generate reports to view information. The process was inconvenient and slow, and it took away from time that could be spent selling.

As Jones and Martinez searched for an integration solution, they had a clear vision: “We wanted to make it possible to immediately see everything that is going on with a particular customer,” Martinez says. “That would allow our entire company to leverage in-depth intelligence to close more sales and provide a higher level of customer service.

TIBCO Cloud Integration

To identify a data integration solution, Jones and Martinez first turned to their Microsoft solution deployment partner. "Our partner had used TIBCO Cloud™ Integration (formerly Scribe Software) to integrate a wide range of systems with Dynamics solutions," Jones says. "We also found that a couple members of our board of directors had had good experiences with the system."

The TIBCO platform delivers a streamlined approach to on-premises and cloud integrations. Businesses can connect front- and back-office business applications using field-tested connectors that adapt to software updates and provide a simple graphical interface for code-free customization. TIBCO Cloud Integration also accelerates integration projects with dozens of pre-built connectors for applications and technologies.

"A big reason why we felt comfortable going with TIBCO is the user interface," Martinez emphasizes. "We can develop integrations without hiring contract developers. We can handle everything in house, and that is a huge cost savings."

Streamlined Migration

The TIBCO solution paid off early in the project. MultiView ran incremental migrations from the three CRM systems to Dynamics 365 for Sales. Prior to going into production, Jones and Martinez coordinated two development migrations and a migration for user-acceptance testing.

"By doing so much of the connector and migration work ahead of time, we completed final cutover during a weekend," Jones says "The TIBCO solution was able to bring in all the data—about 1.5 terabytes—so we hit the ground running that Monday morning."

Reduced Time and Effort Using Automatic Updates

With a large number of customers (approximately 1.7 million) and 33,000+ inventory items, MultiView processes can't be managed manually. The company also partners with more than 2,300 professional organizations through which it places online ads. Additional programmatic advertising is placed on sites like Google, Yahoo, and other major advertising networks.

TIBCO Cloud Integration supported bulk customer and inventory changes across all of these data points. MultiView also relies on the system to monitor Dynamics 365 for Sales for account changes and new customers and opportunities. The changes are then sent to legacy systems.

"Because of the TIBCO connectors, we did not have to recode the integrations to the legacy systems," Martinez says. "In that regard, TIBCO Cloud Integration provides us with backwards compatibility from our new CRM system, which enables us to essentially modernize our legacy systems."

Decommissioned Resource-Intensive Legacy Infrastructure

As part of the CRM migration and the deployment of TIBCO Cloud Integration, MultiView stopped using its legacy application. "We were really eager to get rid of it," Jones reveals. "It accounted for 90% of our messages and created a lot of network traffic, which we have now reduced by about 50% thanks to TIBCO. The TIBCO solution is also a lot easier to manage—so there's less admin time for our IT team."

Easy Access to Information

Perhaps the best of part of using TIBCO is that the sales and the management teams can now work more efficiently—with all customer information at their fingertips. "They don't realize TIBCO is running in the background, they just know they can get to data a lot more easily," Martinez says. "The implementation of TIBCO Cloud Integration has been touted by senior management as one of the best technological implementations in our company's history."