It’s no secret that despite our focus on cloud computing, ProQuest comes to the party with rich heritage in developing enterprise-class systems, typically developed using the J2EE platform. And we continue to work with several large-scale customers who count on our J2EE expertise.

We asked our Head of Solution Design, Fergus Kelledy to port a particular application to Heroku more out of experiment than urgent necessity. The result of the exercise surprised Fergus. It’s fair to say that he went into the exercise as a healthy sceptic, and came out of it as an enthusiastic convert. He even thinks Heroku makes him a better J2EE developer. We’ve made a series of videos where he details his findings.

By nature, Heroku is a technical platform. For those, less interested in the technicalities, and more on the business value, we’ve tried to give something for both audiences.

In this first video, Fergus begins to introduce the key differences in Heroku’s approach.

Here’s a backgrounder to Heroku, Salesforce’s PAAS (Platform as a Service) solution. We’ve been looking into the value proposition, and a couple of our team have been using it to build an application. We will be releasing a series of video updates to tell you more so watch this space.

On December 15th Salesforce announced that they had acquired Rypple, and that Rypple’s next generation social performance management application will be re-launched as “Successforce”. The announcement is here.

This has particular relevance to ProQuest as we are avid adopters of both platforms. We began a journey with Rypple back in May 2011 replacing our previous system SuccessFactors. Ironically, the company SuccessFactors was purchased by the giant SAP just two weeks before the Salesforce/Rypple transaction. The SAP transaction is detailed here – the value was a whopping US$3.4 billion – a hefty price tag and one we predict will turn out to be a very high price. Some challenges are listed in this analysis.  SAP now have five HR platforms their customers have to think about. Go figure.

The more interesting game is Salesforce and Rypple.

We’re keen to see exactly how the integration of SuccessForce into the broader Salesforce platform is realised. Both Salesforce and Rypple heavily promote the concept of the social enterprise. Here’s Salesforce’s pitch, and here’s Rypple’s. As we’ve moved forward with both platforms in the last year or so, we’ve seen the overlap and therefore the inevitable duplication. There are Facebook wall type conversation streams at the core of each product. Salesforce Chatter has ignited our sense of internal collaboration on subjects that concern customers and sales. Rypple is the place where we encourage feedback and conversations on goals and tasks and teamwork. On occasion, say the passage of a successful opportunity into a closed sale, there can be a little confusion as to where exactly our collective thoughts should be captured.

On Clive Roberts’ personal blog at ZeroCapex, he describes Rypple’s neat innovation whereby we could link to Rypple by clicking a button within a Salesforce Opportunity. A neat trick that encouraged content to be fed through into Rypple, and regularly updated content is key to the success of the platform.

We are sure Salesforce have much bigger and better plans for integrating Successforce into the overall platform. To finish this piece here’s a great backgrounder on the days leading up to the $60 million acquisition.

What are your thoughts as to how this marriage will play out?

ProQuest hit a major milestone this week, when one of our major enterprise customers went into production following a major project to migrate key website assets into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Whilst AWS is almost the default standard for young entrepreneurial companies to develop their systems and prepare for potential growth this development represents a major milestone in Australia.

A huge step toward showing Australian corporates the fabulous potential of an agile, elastic, scalable platform for growing their business and handling peak workloads. As soon as we can provide comprehensive details we will publish them here.

NUIX

ProQuest Cloud Story: – ProofFinder

Business Need:

• Rapid conception and delivery of a new website, fully integrated with Salesforce, for a limited edition version of NUIX’s world-leading eDiscovery product
• Rapid creation of efficient business process to execute web-based transactions and capture customer data.

ProQuest Solution:

• Salesforce Sales Cloud,
• Salesforce Sites,
• Conga Composer,
• Paypal integration

ProQuest’s cloud consulting practice combines a range of skills to facilitate new business processes to propel business growth. Within 40 days, our team designed, and fully implemented a solution to ensure target go-live was met.

This fabulous initiative from one of Australia’s most impressive global software companies can be tracked further by clicking on the following image.

• Designed the Solution
• Developed the end-to-end business process
• Integrated Payment integration via Paypal
• Assisted with system testing

Quote
We needed to set up a payment gateway, with a license generation system that tracked and reported through Salesforce.com in a very short time frame, so I went to the ProQuest Consulting team.

All the consultants worked quickly to design, build and deliver a solution that met the brief and exceeded the performance expectations of my senior management. They delivered it to our tight deadlines, and the project launched on schedule.

The key to a fast-paced project like this is communication, and the team went out of their way to let me know the progress of the project at every step. At no point during the project was I in doubt that we could deliver. I would not hesitate to recommend any of the consulting team I worked with.

- Veronicah
Marketing Operations Manager

Our latest investment on our own journey toward better processes, is our purchase of Marketo’s new Spark product. We think it’s a fine product and we’ve been telling many of our customers to take a look as well. We’re excited about what it will bring to us, and we’re itching to get going.

Marketo say that Spark is a new brand of marketing automation tailored specifically for small businesses.  The best part is that Spark shares the same technology foundation that powers Marketo’s award-winning solutions for larger enterprises.

We’re expecting Marketo to allow us to carefully and systematically create outbound permission-based marketing programs  – and capture our inbound marketing, search, email, events and social media. We then want to automate lead nurturing efforts and accurately scores leads in the Australian Salesforce marketplace, so our sales people can gain productivity. Less cold calling, more lead nurturing.  We’re also looking to measure our respective campaigns and use Spark to help us figure out the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Check out the video

Enfinium is an award winning Australian registered financial institution providing online trading and managed account capabilities to retail, high-net worth and institutional clients in Australia and the rest of the world.

Enfinium provides traders access to a global financial markets from a single account and also margin FX trading via the MetaTrader 4 platform.

With the rising popularity of such FX trading and the rapid growth of Enfinium’s Sydney-based Australian business, the company is constantly looking to create efficiencies in its end-to-end business processes so that customers service levels are increased and new leads are handled effectively.

The two core platforms are Salesforce and Metatrader 4, and it became evident that there needed to be tight integration between these two systems.

ProQuest began working with Enfinium in mid-2011 to develop a robust integration between MT4 and Salesforce.

Prior to our development Enfinium were needing to perform considerable manual work to ensure that new MT4 accounts were populated with the original data from existing Salesforce  records. This was becoming unrealistic. Enfinium have an enviable growth trajectory, and handling the quantity of data, and ensuring its integrity, was becoming difficult and constraining Enfinium’s ability to grow.

On the flip side, it was important that as the customer developed a trading history which was recorded in MT4, Enfinium could send this information back into Salesforce as a single source of truth for the company’s account management team to understand their customer, and help them develop further strategies.

ProQuest scoped and delivered a solution to systemically transfer transactions and daily balances on a scheduled daily basis, from MetaTrader to Salesforce, and associate the transactions to the approriate accounts within Salesforce.

See here for the App Exchange review ..

With the help from ProQuest we have managed to integrate alot of the admin functions between MetaTrader and Salesforce by the way of a connector hooking up both sytems. This has proven very successful and has helped save alot of time and has improved accuracy across the board. Thanks to all the ProQuest Team – Daniel Bent Operations Manager.