Not only did TIBCO Cloud Integration eliminate the need to hire developers and locate budget, it provided a much faster time to market. In fact, our total cost of building and supporting these integrations was reduced by 80% and we were able to get 11 integrations in market in less than a year, and it would have taken us four years without TIBCO.
Tom Masotto, VP Product Management
ON24 Cracks CRM & Marketing Automation SaaS Integration
Sees 96% reduction in development effort, 84% cost savings
Challenge
ON24 customers wanted quick access to event-related data-registration details, interactions, and other information so that their sales teams could quickly and effectively engage with prospects. Previous attempts at solving the problem—providing manual data exports and offering raw feeds via an application programming interface (API)—were not enough. Customers found exports were too slow or difficult to manage, and they did not want to adapt their systems to integrate the feed. They wanted a simple, foolproof, automated solution that linked ON24 services with their CRM and marketing automation (MA) systems.
For ON24, meeting this demand was not a nice-to-have. Easy integration would be a selling point for its solutions and enable the company to capture additional market share if it could make initial and future integration fast, maintainable, and cost-effective.
Like many companies, ON24 initially thought that a solution could be managed in house by its development team. It had three criteria for success: Immediate connectivity of 10 CRM or MA applications, fast customer deployments, and profitable integrations.
The plan was to write code that would connect ON24 services with the APIs of the most popular CRM and MA platforms. To test the approach, developers created a custom integration to a single, relatively simple product. The cost and time for this activity exceeded initial estimates. A second integration, involving only two fields, produced similar results.
The prospect of developing—and maintaining—dozens of integrations quickly and for a reasonable cost was daunting. Hurdles included: Learning the various APIs and data stores used by various applications, finding the developer staff with the proper skills, and supporting integrations as vendors updated their APIs. Together, these issues made an internal solution too risky in terms of delivering a quality experience and retaining profitability.
Solution
Given the apparent costs, resource requirements and issues associated with custom coding its integrations, ON24 turned to TIBCO Cloud™ Integration, a cloud-based integration platform that makes it easy and cost-effective to connect to many SaaS services. Besides directly maintaining connections to the most popular CRM and MA products, the TIBCO Cloud Integration ecosystem makes hundreds of partner-created connectors available including: HubSpot, IBM Silverpop, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM, NetSuite, Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com, and SugarCRM.
Benefits
Cost Savings
Using information learned from trying its custom code approach, ON24 quickly realized that leveraging TIBCO Cloud Integration would enable it to profitably exceed its customer needs. By connecting once to TIBCO Cloud Integration, ON24 could immediately leverage the existing TIBCO Cloud Integration connectors for the most important CRM and MA offerings. And by relying on TIBCO Cloud Integration, ON24 would not have to worry about connector maintenance, such as updating code as APIs changed. ON24 estimates over five years it will save $4 million in client integration costs.
Competitive Differentiation, Customer Satisfaction
From a business standpoint, ON24 can now tout its connectivity as a major product feature and competitive differentiator. Every existing and new customer suddenly has instant access to analytics from virtual events in their own CRM and MA systems.
Future
The solution will help increase customer satisfaction and convert more prospects.