As one of the top ICT companies in Japan, Fujistu FSAS, Inc. provides a wide variety of products and services to customers.
A core company in the Fujitsu Group, Fujitsu FSAS supports customers' ICT systems through Japan's largest service system presently consisting of about 850 bases and 10,000+ employees throughout Japan.
The size and scale of Fujitsu's global operations make corporate knowledge management a major challenge. Data must flow across different internal systems in order to distribute front-line engineering data with the organization's primary communications infrastructure.
To facilitate integration, Fujitsu chose to leverage the drivers from CData to seamlessly connect their Microsoft Dynamic CRM system with their SharePoint-based internal incident tracking system. Using bi-directional data integration between group global communication infrastructure and incident tracking infrastructure, Fujitsu FSAS improved application usability and streamlined sharing of product knowledge within the company.
"We liked that any engineers with RDBMS/SQL knowledge could use the CData Drivers without having to learn anything new. Being able to use standard SQL instead of APIs is awesome!."*
- Takayuki Kobayashi, Manager, Fujitsu
Problem:
- Data flows across different internal systems in order to facilitate sharing of front-line system engineer data within the company's communication infrastructure.
Solution:
- Fujitsu FSAS leverages CData Driver technologies to implement real-time bi-directional data synchronization between internal incident tracking (SharePoint) and CRM (Dynamics CRM) systems.
Fujitsu uses SharePoint as its primary communication infrastructure; by leveraging Dynamics CRM to build an incident tracking application, they were able to establish a unique cloud service for the company.
In order to improve the usability of their internal applications, Fujitsu FSAS wanted to build a portal site for internal applications on Microsoft SharePoint (which is used by all of Fujitsu's employees). At the same time, they wanted to use Dynamics CRM, which is capable of building the complex system of incident tracking they needed.
Fujitsu used CData ODBC Driver for SharePoint and Driver for Dynamics CRM to establish a data integration server between the two platforms, giving them the solution they needed.
We interviewed Mr. Koji and Mr. Kobayashi from Fujitsu FSAS, Inc. Business Management HQ (CIT Management Division) to learn more about their data integration bottleneck-and why they chose CData to solve it.
CData: What were some of the obstacles toward building the data integration architecture you needed?
Mr. Koji: Our main issues were engineering resources capable of handling APIs, future maintenance of API integration, and the time and cost of using ETL tools. We have plenty of engineers who are capable of handling SharePoint API and Dynamics CRM APIs, but they work on customer projects, so it's hard for them to find time to work on internal systems. Also, APIs change frequently, so we would need to ensure that those API engineers keep up with those changes, which is a huge burden on our engineer resource management. We considered using an ETL/EAI tool that had adapters for Dynamics CRM, but it couldn't handle SharePoint. Plus, the cost of learning how to use new tools (as well as the price of the tools themselves) gave us pause.
CData: So what made you choose CData ODBC Drivers?
Mr. Kobayashi: We liked that any engineers with RDBMS/SQL knowledge could use the driver without having to learn anything new. Being able to use standard SQL instead of APIs is awesome. As professional engineers, we actually prefer simpler products like CData, and there are less unnecessary functions anyway. Maintenance was another factor: we don't have to worry about keeping up with API changes-all we need to do is install updated CData drivers and that takes care of the changes. The fact that the cost of CData was a fraction of the cost of the ETL/EAI tools was attractive, too.
CData: And what do you think now, after using CData ODBC Drivers?
Mr. Kobayashi: They worked exactly as we expected. We only needed SQL for API integration. We were also very satisfied with the technical support provided by the CData Japan team, which was always prompt and helpful.
CData: Any comments on the future of data enterprise integration in Japan?
Mr. Koji: The demand for simple API integration tools is increasing in an era where multiple cloud services are in use-sometimes even within one company. It would be good if there was a hosted service for such API integration functions; we need to consider providing these services, too.
