Suppose you’re the new CIO at an enterprise-scale company that has “islands of automation” for accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, sales, support, and HR, and your goal is to integrate all business processes.
Make the nightmare more realistic: Your 35 major suppliers use a variety of ordering and billing systems, hosted on every operating system and database that has been in use for the past 10 years. They don’t even all use the same data exchange standards. Cap that all off with a mini-rebellion by your independent customer representatives, who have started to use Salesforce.com for customer relations.
