pivotalcrm - whitepaper _pivotal intelligent internet architecture

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Pivotal CRM’s 3-Tier ArchitectureThe Key to Low Total Cost of Ownership

Executive SummaryA CRM application’s total cost of ownership (TCO) extends well beyond just the initial licensing and implementation fees to include the cost of customizing, integrating, deploying, and administering CRM on an ongoing basis. As a result, today’s CRM buyers have expanded their evaluation focus to encompass platform and architecture criteria that have the greatest impact on total cost of ownership, namely flexibility, scal-ability, and deployability.

Flexibility, as a function of ease of customization and integration, is the strength of Pivotal CRM’s metadata-driven architecture, which separates customer data from business rules (metadata), facilitating the ability to quickly customize a solution to match business processes. Pivotal CRM’s integration framework leverages middleware components, third-party adapters, and Web services to provide a standards-based approach that can significantly decrease the time and effort needed to integrate CRM with enterprise applications, and data both within and across business boundaries.

Pivotal CRM’s 3-tier architecture is based on the enterprise-strength Intel® and Microsoft® platforms; offers three types of clients, including a zero-footprint, zero-install client to facilitate deployment; and can seamlessly distribute customizations to all LAN and WAN-based satellite systems, mobiles, Web, Lotus Notes, and MS Outlook users via the Pivotal CRM synchronization solutions.

As a result, Pivotal CRM provides exceptionally low total cost of ownership across the complete CRM lifecycle, delivering a sensible set of commonly needed features out-of-the-box, while ensuring businesses can quickly customize, integrate, and deploy a solution to match their current and evolving business needs.

Pivotal CRM | White Paper 1

Architecture— The Foundation of Low TCOThe purchasing landscape for CRM has changed radically in the past 12 months. Today’s CRM buyer is looking for a product that is easy to buy; easy to deploy in a predictable timeframe, and will fit with the current and future business IT strategies. And because the majority of an organizations’ investment in license fees, configuration, customization, and training occur well before the software shows evidence of results, the price tag attached to a CRM implementation can seem very high. As a result, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analyses and proof of results are critical vendor evaluation criteria that are coming to light much earlier in the buying process.

Given the complex inter-dependence of typical enterprise technology environments, TCO can be a difficult metric to obtain for a single system. However, there are a few key abilities

that are crucial in order to mitigate the risk of deploying CRM software, and a number of areas to focus on to reduce costs. These include customization, integration, deployment, usability, and upgrades. In fact, leading industry analysts point to 90% of CRM lifecycle costs occurring in the customization, integration, deployment, and ongoing administration of CRM.

Clearly, by adopting a forward-thinking strategy to account for costs in the areas of flexibility (which is a function of ease of customization and integration), scalability and deployability, enterprises can significantly reduce the TCO of their CRM system. And in all of these areas, the lowest total cost approach is a function of the application’s platform and architecture.

Enterprises are beginning to realize that their ability to deliver on internal business objectives while responding opportunistically and intelligently to customer and market opportunities is dependent on their architecture. Today’s

effective CRM architecture must cross multiple databases, applications, and business functions, and must support evolution at each of those layers. However, many of today’s CRM systems tightly couple the customer data

and business processes, and transactions generally associated with marketing, selling, and servicing customers. This tight coupling provides a head-start in automating business processes, but ultimately inflates the total cost of ownership by creating a system that is rigid to change, causing significant disruption to end users during updates and upgrades.

Low TCO CRM ArchitectureThe informed CRM evaluator must take a balanced approach to evaluating both the application and the architecture when considering TCO. Ultimately, however, it is the CRM application’s flexibility, scalability and deployability that will determine total cost of ownership as an organization adapts to its changing marketplace.

Pivotal CRM stands apart from other CRM software solutions in delivering a complete suite of CRM products built on a sensible technology foundation that drives low total ownership costs across the entire CRM lifecycle. Based on a Microsoft® .NET foundation and embracing industry standards, the Pivotal CRM architecture ensures enterprises gain a flexible, scalable, and deployable solution for the richest levels of collaboration and interactivity to increase revenues, margins, and customer loyalty.

The Internet has set high expectations for accessibility to information and system interoperability, despite the fact that many enterprises have substantial investments in pre-Internet systems and applications that can’t interact without a huge investment in costly integration solutions.

Microsoft and other forward-thinking software vendors such as the Pivotal CRM team have taken huge strides towards making the Internet vision a reality. Pivotal CRM is founded on Microsoft .NET, which is the platform of choice for building, deploying, operating and integrating applications for enterprises. It is also the leading platform for Web services—allowing applications to work together in a highly accessible, low cost manner over the Internet, regardless of operating system, device, or programming language.

Pivotal CRM leverages Microsoft servers to provide the scalability, reliability, and ease of integration and deployment required in a CRM solution aimed at enterprises. Some of the Microsoft servers at the core of the Pivotal CRM solution include:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 – Pivotal CRM is optimized to take advantage of the powerful scaling capabilities in SQL Server 2000.

Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 Advanced Server – Pivotal CRM takes advantage of Windows 2000/2003. Advanced Server Network Load Balancing services to distribute IP traffic across a Pivotal CRM-deployed

90% of CRM lifecycle costs occur in the customization, integration, deployment, and ongoing administration of CRM.

Pivotal CRM is founded on Microsoft .NET, which is the platform of choice for building, deploying, operating and integrating applications for enterprises.


application cluster. Pivotal CRM’s single OS engineering optimization eliminates the performance degradation that multi-platform-designed ISVs suffer.

Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) – Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) is the foundation of Pivotal CRM’s high performance,

Web-based applications.

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002 – The Pivotal CRM solution employs BizTalk Server 2002 for business process integration within and between organizations. The Pivotal Integration Connector™ facilitates developing, executing, and managing distributed business processes.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 – Optimized for the Exchange Server 2000 communications infrastructure,

Pivotal CRM provides access to information at any time and from anywhere through wireless communication, unified messaging, handheld devices, and teleconferencing.

Through Microsoft .NET, the Pivotal CRM solution ensures our customers have the pathways they need to leverage and extend existing investments in technology to take advantage of the increased productivity, efficiency, and lower TCO that the Internet offers.

3-Tier Internet ArchitectureWhen the Pivotal CRM team set out to architect a CRM solution for enterprises that delivers exceptionally low TCO, we created a 3-tier Internet application architecture with clear separation of the presentation services tier (user interface), business services tier (where business logic resides), and the data services tier (where customer data is kept separate from metadata).

This architecture enables organizations to save substantial time and resources by centralizing application customization, development, and maintenance at the

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Figure 1-1: Pivotal CRM's 3-Tier Architecture

Presentation Services Tier (Client Tier)

Business Services Tier

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Pivotal’s CRM suite is built using industry standards and a 3-tier framework, resulting in an architecture that has the flexibility to meet the changing business needs of enterprises.


middle tier. With graphical tools for customizing the look, feel, and functionality delivered at the presentation services tier, the business services tier, and the database services tier, changes to business logic can be made quickly and efficiently with relatively little impact on existing applications. And because there is no client software to install, the distribution of both application and data modifications to users, regardless of their location or access method, is streamlined.

The Pivotal CRM architecture also drives improved interoperability between other customer-relevant applications, such as ERP systems. This is a result of the ability to integrate applications at the business services tier by reusing business logic that resides here. Interoperability is fundamental to extending access to customers and partners beyond the enterprise, as it relies on common standards for Internet communication and collaboration.

Presentation Services TierPivotal Rich Client™ is a highly interactive browser-based client, providing presentation tier services on laptops and desktops. The presentation services tier defines the interface through which a user interacts with the application, passing validated information from the user to the business services tier, and receiving results. Alternatively, Pivotal Wireless™ is a portal-based solution for wireless devices, delivering CRM functionality to mobile employees using wireless handheld devices such as web-enabled cell phones, PDAs, two-way pagers, etc.

Because the presentation tier is clearly separated from the rest of the application, users can easily obtain access to the system via different channels, such as Web, Windows, and Wireless, in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. Internet-based presentation tools such as browsers provide familiar navigation schema—including graphically rich icons with descriptive text and guided navigation cues—to drive rapid and comfortable end-user adoption.

Business Services TierThe business services tier contains the application logic. This tier receives input from the presentation services tier, interacts with the data services tier to perform data-level transactions, and sends results back to the presentation tier. The Pivotal Business Server™ supplies the underlying structure that maintains system integrity, providing business logic and data retrieval services for the entire Pivotal CRM suite of applications. The Pivotal Extended Servers work in conjunction with the Pivotal Business Server to deliver the application-specific functionality required by CDC MarketFirst and Pivotal Assisted Selling.

The Pivotal Business Server is an XML-based, 3-tier, transaction-processing platform powered by the mature and robust Microsoft COM+ environment. The Business Server logs and tracks all transactions, and manages the workflow of a customer throughout the entire customer lifecycle—from customer engagement (typically through a marketing initiative) through the sales process, transaction and request fulfillment, and support phases.

The Pivotal Business Server enforces business logic and rules through Pivotal AppServer Services and AppServer Rules. The AppServer Services are a set of COM+ objects responsible for the Pivotal CRM

User logs onto Pivotal Rich Client through browser (IE)*

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*ActiveX controls, business logic and formatting information are downloaded and cached as temporary Internet files on the client machine as needed.

Figure 1-2: Query Flow through the Pivotal CRM Business Services Tier

Presentation Services Tier (Client Tier)


Data Services Tier

1 User logs onto Pivotal CRM using Pivotal Rich Client.

2 User sends a request for data (via HTTP), which is captured by the AppServer Services running on the Business Services Tier.

3 The AppServer Services checks the AppServer Rules to ensure the request complies with current business rules.

4 The AppServer Services passes the verified request to the Enterprise Customer Data and Business Module (if needed).

5 The requested data and any accompanying metadata are sent back to the AppServer Services.

6 The AppServer Services passes the requested data to the user (via HTTP).


database transactions. These objects handle all the direct actions required to read from and write to the Pivotal CRM database. They deliver, format, and send/receive information and data to and from the browser, execute queries, and pass data to Pivotal AppServer Rules. The AppServer Rules are COM objects or .NET assemblies that implement the application business rules, and can be written in any COM, COM+ or .NET compliant language.

Data Services TierThe data services tier stores and retrieves data. All CRM system data is collected in two separate databases: the Business Module (BM) metadata database and Enterprise Customer Data (ED) database. By separating the data from the metadata, the Pivotal CRM application is easily customized to meet changing organizational needs with no disruption to the rest of the system or end users.

The ED contains corporate or enterprise data such as company profile data, contact information, order history, etc. that end users need to access and update. The BM contains metadata, which is data about the way in which the ED is organized, and how the Pivotal CRM application will behave.

The BM stores the following types of data:

Database definitions, including table and •record structures

User Interface definitions, such as form layouts, •lists, report layout and contents, templates, etc.

Business rules and workflow definitions (COM+ •objects or Pivotal Agents™), queries, reports, etc.

Security definitions that define security requirements •to protect data at run time

The Pivotal CRM metadata-driven architecture lowers the total cost of deployment because it’s only the metadata stored in the BM that’s modified when changes are made to the presentation services tier or the data services tier. Ongoing changes are managed centrally, and are automatically deployed to the various satellite systems (if applicable) and users from a central location. And because the execution and development environments are kept separate, the application can tolerate a high level of customization without a significant impact on existing applications.

Flexibility Drives Low TCOA flexible CRM application is one that is both easy to customize and easy to integrate with intra- and extra-enterprise applications and data sources. Architectural flexibility is about making the CRM software, and thus CRM processes, work in the way the organization sees fit—not how the CRM vendor thinks it should work. Many vendors’ architectures are inherently rigid, making their CRM application very difficult to customize. This raises TCO by forcing customers to abandon proven business processes and start anew, either because customization cannot be done, or because it is simply too expensive.

A customizable CRM application supports changes in both underlying data definitions and business process rules without requiring alteration of source code, binaries, or runtime environments. How a company handles its business rules can provide significant competitive advantage, because adapting business rules f aster than competitors in response to market pressures or customer demand allows companies to sell to or service customers faster and better than their competitors.

A CRM application that features ease of integration is not only compatible with pre-existing systems, but creates synergy between them to enhance and extend functionality. To be effective, the CRM vendor must supply an integration framework that spans multiple data stores, applications, and business processes across departmental and even enterprise boundaries.

Form definitions,business rules,

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Enterprise Customer Data (ED)• Companies• Contracts• Orders, etc.

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Figure 1-3: Data Services Tier


The true measure of an application’s flexibility is based on the cost to perform customization and integration enhancements. These costs can include increases in deployment time, decreases in application performance, the cost of acquiring the skills to perform the enhancement, and future costs associated with whether the enhancement can be used (or must be discarded) during application upgrades. Clearly, customization and integration enhancements are not limited to just the initial implementation, but rather require ongoing adjustment.

The Pivotal CRM Approach to CustomizationThe Pivotal CRM solution maintains the highest level of customizability through our meta-data driven approach, and our open and flexible data model. These two characteristics of Pivotal CRM distinctly—and uniquely—address the business need of enterprises for ease of customization because:

Customizations are saved as metadata in the Business •Module, not as code or rigid table extensions, and sent to users via the same technology used to synchronize Enterprise Data. As a result, all users are seamlessly updated regardless of their access method.

Pivotal CRM’s open and flexible data model is a result •of the fact that all forms, fields, etc. are saved as metadata, so changes to business rules, workflows, and processes can be made simply and quickly.

While the Pivotal CRM team supplies a rich set of •tables out-of-the-box, it’s easy to add new tables using the graphical customization tools provided in the Pivotal CRM Toolkit.

Open Data ModelExcessive functionality increases an application’s complexity and reduces the usability of the application for the end-user, resulting in increased end-user training costs and risk of end-user rejection. The only remedy for an application that is too functionality-rich is to remove the excessive functionality during the implementation phase. But this approach to customization can be very risky. Many CRM applications are built upon a much more complex web of intra-dependencies than their leaner counterparts.

In order not to introduce aberrant behavior into the application, customizers must pay extra attention when excising excessive functionality from their implementation. This added attention, whether in the form of extra implementation time to comprehensively study all the application functionality before making any changes, or simply hiring more knowledgeable specialists, can significantly raise the TCO of a CRM application.

The Pivotal CRM solution offers a viable alternative—a leaner application and a comprehensive set of graphical customization tools to ensure that customization is rapid, reliable, and cost-effective.

Database complexity is a good indicator of the overall complexity of the CRM product. The underlying data structure of Pivotal CRM is open, flexible, and easy to understand. With less than 200 tables, Pivotal CRM supplies a majority of the functionality required by most

Data Model

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Pivotal ToolkitBusiness Module

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Browser ClientMobile Client Windows Client

Data Tier (Data Model)

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Figure 2-1: Pivotal CRM Toolkit allows customization of all 3 tiers from a single location

“ A successful CRM implementation is directly linked to the usability of the application, making fit more important than an application’s overall depth and breadth... It is critical to first determine user needs and then evaluate vendors based on need-to-have versus nice-to-have functionality.” AMR Research

“Picking the Right CRM Vendor: It’s More Than a One Horse Race” September 2001


enterprises. By comparison, CRM applications with 10 to 20 times as many tables provide excessive functionality, resulting in a data model that is not only inflexible, but often simply too complex to understand. This necessitates a great deal of reliance on specialized, vendor-supplied customizers, raising TCO.

Intelligent Customization FrameworkThe customization process for Pivotal CRM was designed to be intuitive for customizers to use and learn. We

selected familiar metaphors such as forms, tables, lists, and queries to represent the key elements that customizers interact with, and organized them to make specifying the interaction between them easy and intuitive.

Pivotal CRM provides an elegant, uncomplicated framework for how these metaphors interact with each other to create functionality. Where other CRM vendors may require tedious and unintuitive changes to 5 or 6

different elements simply to add an additional field to a form, the Pivotal CRM framework requires only 2 changes.

For example, creating a simple customer contact form requires the customizer simply to declaratively link the new form to the corresponding database element, lay out the form using our graphical form designer, and register the new form with the navigation menu. All this is done without needing to write a single line of code. If a new table is required for this form, Pivotal CRM has graphical

tools to allow the customizer to quickly build new tables into the system.

The Pivotal CRM system also provides a comprehensive set of default interaction behaviors that saves the customizer from having to implement functionality over and over again. This default behavior includes user navigation support for easy navigation to related records of a given form, ways to aggregate data on a list, and behavior for saving, updating and retrieving data from the database.

Most customization is performed through our advanced, user-friendly graphical customization toolkit.

The Pivotal CRM Toolkit™ is an easy-to-use visual tool that enables rapid customization to meet business needs. Customizers work with Active Forms, which are the visual

representation of CRM data, business processes and workflow that the user sees on their client. Active Forms contain the database structure—every field on a form, is by default, linked to a table in the database. To modify Active Forms to meet the needs of users, customizers lay out the form directly using point-and-click buttons and other screen elements.

The powerful WYSIWYG model for Active Forms customization makes the process easy, rapid, and intuitive. Pivotal CRM includes Active Form Templates out-of-the-box with logic and rules built-in, and additional logic and workflow can easily be attached. In this way, customization can be carried out by any business analyst, as no code level changes are required.

For additional customization, the Pivotal CRM team makes available a comprehensive library of API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) for Visual Basic and VBScript application developers to customize against, as well as providing support for .NET scripting with the ability to write new server scripts in C#, VB.Net and other .Net languages.

Figure 2-2: Intuitive Metaphors for Ease of Customization

Figure 2-3: Pivotal CRM Customization Environment

“ The number one reason for choosing Pivotal CRM over other CRM vendors is our strong support for customization and overall solution flexibility.”Based on internal competitive survey of deals over

nine consecutive quarters. Total deals analyzed=154


The Pivotal CRM Approach to IntegrationAt the heart of any CRM system is a consolidated data repository of critical customer, partner, and employee information. The integration challenge for enterprises is to share this CRM data with customer, employee, and partner data from other internal systems and departments; integrate databases that use distinct schemas; create

composite applications that incorporate functionality from third parties; and, make data and business processes available and manageable across public networks.

In the face of all these challenges, customer integration goals generally include one or more of the following:

Making more •sources of data available, despite a myriad of data formats and database systems;

Driving higher levels of productivity and automation •through business process integration;

Offering users richer application functionality through •application integration.

The Pivotal CRM system provides a number of connectors to facilitate the integration of its solutions with external, third-party applications, and data sources:

Intellisync for Pivotal Connectors facilitate •synchronization of PIM data with users of Lotus Notes and MS Outlook. For more information, refer to the section, “Pivotal Intellisync” on page 13.

The Pivotal Interaction Connectors provide connectivity •to telephony systems and third-party customer interaction platforms to facilitate the creation of call and contact centers. Out-of-the-box support is provided for Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center (I3’s CIC), and Intel’s NetMerge CPS platform for Computer Telephony Interaction (CTI).

The Pivotal Integration Connector provides a cost-•effective integration framework that is extensible to both Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi). At base, the Pivotal Integration Connector consists of a set of tools including an XML adapter, an integration interface, and a configuration client. The Pivotal Integration Connector supports open Internet standards, middleware, and Web services, facilitating the seamless, bi-directional exchange of data and process integration between Pivotal CRM and 3rd party applications using HTTP. It also supports XML and SOAP based Web services, providing a complete set of integration options.

The Middleware AdvantagePivotal CRM supports the following Web services pillars:

The Internet The Internet is the de facto arena for enterprise and intra-enterprise collaboration.

HTTP HyperText Transport Protocol is the lowest-cost information transport mechanism, and has ubiquitous reach.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

XML is the lingua franca for Internet computing.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

SOAP is a standard Web protocol to expose useful functionality to Web users, by allowing systems to talk to one another and make requests.

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Figure 2-4: Pivotal Integration Overview

Integration Client Provides:A GUI that implementers use •to automate the implementation process

Management ofintegration •design andadministration

Controls implementation •and maintenance costs

Uses existing business rules •for the data fields (objects) being integrated


In general, any data source that can be connected to middleware, can connect to Pivotal CRM. The Pivotal Integration Connector sits between the Pivotal Business Server and the middleware solution, connecting to the Business Server via an XML interface. To share information between Pivotal CRM

and multiple front- and back-end office systems, the Pivotal Integration Connector transforms the Pivotal XML schema to and from the general XML schema supported by leading middleware vendors. Adaptors perform the same function as the Pivotal Integration Connector for each back-office data source.

The Pivotal Integration Connector utilizes published conversion rules for standardizing XML schemas, thereby enabling communication between systems that use different XML schemas. In this way, Pivotal CRM supports the routing of documents and information, provides synchronization of data with ERP systems (including MS Great Plains, SAP, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle and others), and gives consistent, near-real time availability of data throughout the organization and across business boundaries.

Security is of prime concern when business data crosses enterprise boundaries. The Pivotal Integration Connector provides secure XML over HTTP (SSL) for both EAI and B2Bi, communicating between the middleware product and the Pivotal Business Server using XML over HTTPs, and securing messages for integrity, privacy, and non-repudiation, using platform-neutral mechanisms.

Application Integration via Web Services1

The Pivotal CRM solution’s 3-tier architecture is designed on the Microsoft .NET framework, which facilitates the ability of Pivotal CRM to integrate with and consume Web services. Pivotal CRM applications are inherently modular and expose various application elements.

The Pivotal CRM architecture includes an XML-based CRM server that supports an array of applications, clients, and users by providing security, transaction capability, and authentication for Web services during consumption and presentation. Web client can present Web services by providing relevant data for the user, and by providing remotely accessible application functionality as a customization.

Simple Web services typically are used to perform non-transactional “information supplementation” such as delivering news feeds, updating static information dashboards, providing additional company information, etc. More complex Web services have the ability to provide support for transactions, such as customer initiation and order fulfillment.

Some highlights of the Web services support in the Pivotal CRM architecture include:

A history of supporting XML accessing critical •application elements.

Ability to exchange data as a Web service, such as the •ability to send/receive company, contact, and order information between the Pivotal CRM system and external systems.

Able to integrate, consume, and present Web services •within Pivotal CRM applications as a customization, and for the purpose of extending the product line.

The following diagram illustrates one example of how Pivotal CRM might utilize Web services to perform simple order placement and fulfillment.

Scalability for High Performance and Lower TCOThe rallying cry for today’s enterprise IT group implementing CRM is no longer simply “scalability” or CRM at any cost. With so many businesses experiencing intensified cost cutting, especially in their IT organizations, it’s important that CRM application and platform vendors such as CDC Software and Intel® respond with sensible, results-focused CRM. Stepping up to the plate, Intel is advocating a new approach to scalability—“Scale Right.”

“Scale Right” refers to balancing an assessment of the business requirements of a CRM system with its impact to the current—and planned—IT infrastructure. By choosing CDC Software's award-winning, scalable Pivotal CRM on Intel architecture-based systems, enterprises can realize business value through a flexible and agile approach to server architecture based on modular building blocks. The benefits also extend to encompass the cost savings associated with affordable, manageable, off-the-shelf hardware and software.

Integration to Middleware Enables:

Mapping, orchestration and •translation management

Application of critical business •processes, workflow, and communication (transport) protocols between systems.

Definition of agreements among •internal applications and trading partner organizations to regulate electronic data exchanges

Because it’s based on the industry standards of middleware and Web services, Pivotal CRM’s integration process allows for rapid implementation and faster time to results.

1 Web Services. “Vendors that need to improve their integration story should look at Web services as a means to improve their ability to connect to both the data and processes in legacy systems. While the Web services market is still in its infancy, AMR Research believes its initial use will revolve around application-to-application integration behind the firewall.” (Finding Success in the Mid-Market, AMR, Feb 1, 2001)


Scalability rests largely on the Pivotal CRM platform strategy, and our strong relationships with enterprise platform partners Intel and Microsoft. Our robust, scalable, high-performance architecture scales to support access for full-time users, and large populations of occasional and external users as well.

With our commitment to Microsoft’s scalable enterprise computing platform on Intel Architecture, Pivotal CRM customers are able to scale up their applications to handle more users and more data by adding resources to existing servers such as additional processors, memory, or disks. For many of our customers, however, the horizontal or “scale out” approach is most important, allowing them to increase performance in the face of additional users, workload, volume, and functionality, while simultaneously addressing reliability through the addition of application servers.

"Scale Right"The combination of Intel’s highly scalable server technologies and our 3-tier CRM application is raising the bar for high performance computing architectures—architectures that can demonstrably enhance the competitive performance of technology-enabled enterprises.

Enterprises are moving away from isolated, vertical islands of proprietary data toward a more open and broadly deployable computing model. Today’s enterprise requires a high-performance server infrastructure that scales and adapts to every area of the end-to-end enterprise: front-office, back-office and wherever business

goals demand the highest possible levels of application performance.

Many IT decision makers now look at server consolidation as a key to controlling IT costs. However, rather than just consolidating on a mainframe, IT personnel should place the focus on optimizing IT assets. “Scale Right” is Intel’s server deployment strategy that aims to maximize the use of all the enterprises server assets by optimizing a company’s mix of scale-up and scale-out deployments. This is a more efficient and more agile deployment strategy that should pay off in superior business value to the enterprise.

The first step in any “Scale Right” strategy is to assess business requirements. For example, uninterrupted up-time might be critical to maximizing customer loyalty and partner and employee productivity, or the more pressing issue may be adding capacity to the CRM database management system to handle a greater number of concurrent users or a greater number of ad hoc queries.

Whatever the business-level objectives are, Intel-based small-, medium- and large-scale servers deliver superior price/performance, across the board. What’s more, choosing the right deployment model (the right mix of

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1 User submits an order form in Pivotal CRM

2 A Web services query is sent to check the customer’s credit via a credit bureau’s Web service

3 Credit bureau sends a Web services response to Pivotal CRM indicating that the customer’s credit is good

4 The shipping instructions are sent to a shipping service exposed as a Web service

5 Shipper confirms the instructions by sending a Web services response to Pivotal CRM

6 Order status is updated with information that product has shipped.

The combination of Intel’s highly scalable server technologies and Pivotal CRM’s 3-tier CRM application is raising the bar for high performance computing architectures.

Figure 2-5: Pivotal CRM Web services Architecture


scale-out and scale-up) allows businesses to dial-in exactly how much scalability, availability, and agility they need at the most affordable price. Pivotal CRM on Intel-based servers deliver lower TCO in a “Scaled Right” environment.

Microsoft ScalabilityThe Microsoft platform delivers both scalability and value, enabling solution providers like the Pivotal CRM team to design applications that scale via two methods: scale-up and scale-out. Pivotal CRM takes advantage of both the scale-out features (like network load balancing) and

scale-up features (like multi-threaded, SMP support) provided by the Microsoft platform, in order to address the capacity needs of enterprises when it comes to Pivotal CRM, the underlying database and web infrastructure.

The Microsoft platform has been designed to scale-up and scale-out in response to the dynamic processing requirements demanded of today’s enterprise, regardless of where they happen in the architecture.

Whether it’s handling query processing, or large-scale database applications, the Microsoft platform delivers levels of scaling flexibility for the most demanding IT environments. As demonstrated by industry-standard benchmarks, Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 and SQL Server 2000 offer on-demand scalability to meet the demanding requirements of business applications like Pivotal CRM. The Microsoft platform has achieved world-record performance in benchmark tests with the lowest total cost of ownership on the market. Without having to over-buy computing power up-front, customers can incrementally scale their IT infrastructure as needed.

Pivotal CRM—a High Performance Solution For enterprises, scalability is above all about creating high performance CRM from the user perspective. Unfortunately, there is currently no hard data on user expectations of enterprise applications such as CRM. However, it’s clear that power users—users who are connected most of the time to the CRM system, such as contact center employees and support specialists—have the greatest need for high-performance CRM, and will tolerate less system latency than the occasional or disconnected user. Ad hoc users will have different performance requirements. It’s critical that both the

CRM application and the network-level infrastructure be “tunable” to perform within existing network infrastructure and bandwidth constraints.

Together with Microsoft and Intel, we deliver a CRM application that is tunable to meet the performance needs of different types of users in enterprises through the following mechanisms:

Intelligent client-side processing – The application can be customized to offload some processing to the client system, thereby reducing server-side processing and network roundtrips. Some examples of client-side processing include data validation, formula calculation, and workflow.

Data Compression – The Pivotal CRM server compresses all data sent to the Pivotal Rich Client, maximizing throughput and minimizing transmission time. The result is highly efficient bandwidth use and improved response times for users.

Efficient server-side processing – Pivotal CRM caches workflow and UI rules on the Presentation Services Tier. This results in a highly efficient server-side processing and reduces round trips to the Business Services Tier. Users also benefit from a distinct improvement in performance following caching.

Data Synchronization Manager – Pivotal CRM reduces network traffic by only sending metadata updates to the Business Services Tier of satellite servers when it detects a change in the metadata. Similarly, only the necessary updates are pushed out to clients for UI or business process changes. The result is minimal network traffic and increased user performance.

Network Performance Analysis Tools – Today’s corporate networks are filled to capacity. As Intel’s Thomas stated, “CIOs run their networks continually at 110%, because all available bandwidth is immediately consumed.” Applications, therefore, must be both a “good network citizen” and allow for continual fine tuning as the corporate network evolves.

The Pivotal CRM network analysis tools help administrators identify network bottlenecks and improve performance by optimizing client-side processing, identifying unnecessary network round-trips, improving “wire-level” performance, optimizing application server-side processing, streamlining security handling, and improving database structure and record-level data access.

Pivotal takes advantage of both the scale-out and scale-up features provided by the Microsoft platform in order to address the capacity needs of mid-size enterprises.

Pivotal caches workflow and UI rules on the Presentation Services Tier, resulting in highly efficient server-side processing.


Load Balancing – Pivotal supports the deployment of master and satellite systems to distribute system load more evenly, or divide administrative functions based on the requirements of different geographical locations or departments. Entire master systems can be replicated and synchronized, or just a subset (based on filters), ensuring data reliability in the case of a main system failure. Satellite systems can also host other satellites and mobile systems, moving data closer to users and thereby delivering superior performance.

Intel Solution Services – Pivotal leverages Intel Services, which support industry needs from application optimization and porting through guidance on end-to-end e-Business integration. Intel Services allow companies to test, tune, scale, and prove their solutions with minimal impact to their day-to-day business by providing optimal environments for safely designing and testing solutions.

Ease of Deployment Lowers TCO A deployable CRM application should be cost-effective to install, maintain and upgrade, no matter whether the organization is a multinational company with hundreds of regional offices, or a single office with multiple departments. Deployability is a major factor in lowering the TCO of a system, as there are enormous costs

associated with deploying applications to a large—and distributed—end user base, then supporting these users as the application changes over time.

The Pivotal CRM architecture has been designed with deployability in mind.

Pivotal CRM employs a browser-based zero-client install that simplifies deployment and ongoing administration. And because all application customization, upgrades, and maintenance are carried out exclusively at the middle tier, client-side updates are seamlessly communicated to users around the world with no additional requirement for client-side maintenance.

Our modular deployment method allows each of the five, pre-integrated product suites in Pivotal CRM to be rolled out separately, reducing the cost-to-results ratio. This means that companies can deploy Pivotal Sales™ and later seamlessly deploy Pivotal Service™, then CDC MarketFirst™ as requirements and budgets allow. There are no additional infrastructure costs associated with integrating multiple modules.

Pivotal Rich Clients The Pivotal CRM team provides a range of access methods to support CRM application users according to their needs:

Pivotal Mobile Client™ – allows disconnected use of the Pivotal CRM system, including read/write access to data, quote creation, offline product catalogs, and much more. All synchronization with the master database is carried out via Pivotal SyncStream.

Pivotal Windows Client™ – a feature- and function-rich client for users working in client-server LAN environments.

Pivotal Thin Client™ – a zero-footprint client that provides portal access to Pivotal CRM for partners and users that require less interactivity and more structured database access, without the full transactional support that other users may require.

Pivotal Rich Client™ – combines the feature-rich, interactive transactional support of Pivotal Windows client, together with the low-maintenance, low TCO and high accessibility that a browser-based application provides.

Today we’re in the midst of a sea change regarding the appropriate size of web-based client applications. Should there be any code on the client? Or just the right code on the client?

While virtually all businesses understand the cost benefits of zero client-side maintenance, they have historically paid for their highly accessible zero maintenance thin client with reduced features, functionality, and performance as a result of high network traffic and latency. A “zero client footprint” is a marketing buzzword that obscures the need for a self-installing, self-administering, self-maintaining client that has the intelligence to perform appropriate levels of client-side processing to increase performance and allow for variation in user-level customization.

As CRM application buyers appraise the “code on the client” issue, the “intelligent client”—with the “right code on the client”—is becoming an important option for buyers that prefer high performance, feature-rich, Internet-based CRM applications.

Pivotal Rich Client provides a web browser-based user interface to the Pivotal CRM application. But unlike pure HTML-based clients that suffered from performance degradation and limitations,2 Pivotal Rich Client offers a much higher degree of accessibility and interactivity. Designed for sales, marketing, and support specialists, Pivotal Rich Client takes a Document Object Model (DOM) approach, incorporating both Dynamic HTML and Visual Basic scripts to allow for rendering of web pages on the client—there’s no need to send data back and forth to the server until a logical transaction is to be completed.

While virtually all businesses understand the cost benefits of zero client-side maintenance, they have historically paid for it with reduced features, functionality and performance.

2 Studies have shown that simple HTML-based solutions generate between 5 and 15 times the network activity needed in order to produce the same level of user interactivity in the same amount of time as intelligent clients—and they do so with much reduced user application performance.


As a result, Rich Client provides robust functionality and advanced features, while delivering noticeable performance and user satisfaction improvement.

Pivotal Rich Client passes many business logic requests (such as opening a form, running a search, or saving a form) to COM objects on the middle tier, providing users with access to a centrally administered repository of business logic and data. Business logic can also

be executed on the Rich Client in the form of client-side scripts.

For example, customizers may attach logic to custom buttons, or they might create scripts that execute logic on the client when a user saves a form or creates a new contact (i.e., to perform extra validation). These scripts are small in size and downloaded to the client on demand, whenever the user performs actions that require client-side processing.

In this way, Pivotal Rich Client delivers the functionality and performance users require, while still providing administrators with a low-maintenance client solution that drives low TCO by simplifying deployment and ongoing administration.

Synchronization—the Key to Low TCO Clients In the highly distributed computing environment typical of today’s mobile workforces, synchronization is a fundamental requirement. The complexity and expense involved in keeping data and application code customizations/upgrades synchronized with database replicas distributed across WANs, LANs, and mobile clients has become a key TCO issue.

The Pivotal CRM system lowers the TCO by ensuring the efficient distribution of changes to both Enterprise Data and the business logic stored in the Business Module. Modifications to the Pivotal CRM system can be moved from an off-line development system into production with a single command from the administrator.

When changes to the metadata repository are made, a compressed version of the repository is distributed to all LAN- and WAN-based satellite systems, mobiles, Web, Lotus Notes, and MS Outlook users via the Pivotal CRM synchronization solutions.

Synchronization is built into the core of Pivotal CRM, its Business Server, and provides distribution and synchronization for all facets of the Pivotal CRM system,

including data, metadata, and application code. With support for both automated server-based push synchronization, and manually initiated client-based pull, Pivotal CRM provides companies with the right solutions that work in concert to support their entire mobile workforce.

Pivotal SyncStreamPivotal SyncStream™ is a component of the Pivotal Business Server that drives lower TCO by enabling the distribution of Business Module (BM) updates and Enterprise Customer Data (ED) changes throughout an organization, synchronizing master database changes with satellite and mobile systems, and vice-versa.

With Pivotal Syncstream, satellite systems scale as your organization grows, providing local load balancing while allowing access to BM and ED databases that are either subsets or replicas of the parent system. Mobile systems contain a local copy of the BM and a subset of the ED databases, so mobile users can work while disconnected from the network. In this way, SyncStream guarantees real-time read- and write-access to enterprise data for laptop and desktop users of Pivotal CRM applications, and lowers TCO by centrally pushing customization changes out to all end users.

Pivotal SyncStream consists of a number of applications and services that work in concert to coordinate updates. Changes to the BM or ED databases are tracked, and when a record is added or modified, LAN-based clients are immediately notified. For mobile or disconnected workers, changes are packaged into synchronization messages, security is checked, and then the messages are addressed to the users’ systems that need to be updated. The messages are passed via the SyncStream database to the HTTP message server on IIS.

The Pivotal SyncStream database serves as a failsafe measure, retaining a local copy of both inbound and outbound synchronization messages until they can be confirmed as processed by the recipient system. The next time a user connects, authentication takes place, the messages are sent, and data synchronization occurs seamlessly in the background. Because changes to fields are made at different times, SyncStream compares changes and validates at the field level, and commits them at the record level in order to maintain the integrity of the data.

Pivotal Rich Client delivers the functionality and performance users require, while still providing administrators with a low-maintenance client.

Pivotal SyncStream guarantees real-time read and write access to enterprise data for laptop and desktop users, and can centrally push customization changes out to all end users.


Pivotal Intellisync Enterprises often grow quickly, expanding through acquisitions that can result in a single organization trying to support many disparate systems and clients. Effective use of any CRM solution requires seamless integration and synchronization of customer data across the distributed enterprise, despite multiple systems, access methods and applications. Ensuring data consistency, accuracy and timeliness between calendars, task lists and contact information from both connected and disconnected users on multiple client systems can be a complex challenge. Pivotal Intellisync™ drives low TCO by offering the ability to bi-directionally synchronize Pivotal data with multiple mail clients across an organization.

While Pivotal SyncStream supports synchronization within Pivotal CRM Suite, Intellisync provides a consistent

view of information between Pivotal CRM and a user’s Personal Information Manager (PIM), enabling individuals to synchronize their Pivotal Sales activity and contact information with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.

Allowing users to filter items, and customize events and activities to be synchronized, Intellisync drives data synchronization from the client side, providing for a highly scalable solution. A one-step synchronization process lets users launch the client-side application and initiate the Intellisync Engine Run Time, which opens an HTTP connection to the Intellisync engine running on Pivotal’s middle tier server.

Intellisync coordinates the batched data transfer between Pivotal CRM data and the PIM application. Conflicts are resolved and errors tracked at the field level, engine level and within the Pivotal system, ensuring data integrity. Users can also elect to manually resolve any data conflict, ensuring only accurate data enters their client.

Pivotal WirelessPivotal Wireless enables mobile employees real-time read and write access to critical customer data. Pivotal Wireless offers both an out-of-the-box application for immediate deployment, and a highly flexible solution easily tailored for the unique needs of any organizations’ mobile employees using wireless, hand held devices such as web-enabled cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and two-way pagers.

Pivotal Wireless reads and writes data to and from the Pivotal Enterprise Customer Database.To take advantage of Pivotal Wireless, users only need an HTML- or a WML-compliant micro-browser loaded on their wireless device of choice. Pivotal Wireless is a server-side solution, requiring only that the wireless device’s browser be pointed at the correct URL. There is no client-side software required on the wireless device, other than the micro-browser. Additionally, there is no data stored on the device, meaning data is protected and unlikely to fall into the wrong hands. For data passing over the wire, customers have the option to implement a 128-bit SSL certificate.3

Pivotal Intellisync allows organizations to support multiple clients—users can synchronize their Pivotal Sales activity and contact information with either their Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook client.

Pivotal Wireless is a server-side solution that utilizes a true thin client, requiring only that the wireless device’s browser be pointed at the correct URL.

Figure 4-1: Pivotal SyncStream Architecture

3 The success of the SSL implementation depends largely on the local carrier that the customer chooses.


When a user enters the Pivotal Wireless URL into their device’s micro-browser, their wireless gateway service opens an HTTP connection to the Internet. The Pivotal Wireless Web Server receives user requests and notifies

the Pivotal Business Server. Business Server generates an XML document (data) with content defined by the security module set by the customer in the Business Module. Pivotal Wireless then takes the XML document and renders it with XSL into HTML

or WML for display on the device. All forms, as well as searches submitted by the user, are optimized for wireless devices, ensuring user performance levels are met.

Conclusions

Total cost of ownership assessments must take into consideration costs throughout the life of a CRM application. Some analysts point to 90% of CRM lifecycle costs occurring in customizing, integrating, deploying, and administering CRM.As such, TCO for a CRM application can be determined by examining its architecture (and the platform it’s built on) for the following three fundamental criteria:

Flexibility—does the architecture facilitate the configuration, customization and integration of the CRM application, both at the outset and over time as your business needs evolve?

Pivotal CRM provides a sensible set of commonly needed features out-of-the-box without the excessive depth that makes many other CRM applications inflexible. Pivotal’s metadata-driven architecture, in combination with powerful and intuitive customization tools, results in a CRM solution that allows you to quickly customize a solution to match your current and evolving business processes. Pivotal provides a cost-effective integration framework that is extensible to both EAI and B2Bi via industry-standard middleware, third party adapters, and Web services, facilitating seamless, bi-directional exchange of data and integration of processes. And because it’s standards-based, Pivotal’s integration solution ensures that you can quickly adapt and extend your CRM system dynamically as business systems and partners change.

Scalability—does the architecture let you scale and improve application performance cost-effectively?

Pivotal’s architecture leverages a 100% Microsoft/Intel platform to drive low TCO by letting you “scale right” to address business needs. Pivotal CRM allows you to scale up to handle more users and more data by adding resources to existing servers, or “scale out” to increase performance in the face of additional users, workload, volume, and functionality, while simultaneously addressing reliability through the addition of application servers.

In addition, Pivotal’s architecture allows you to tune the application and network-level infrastructure to perform within existing infrastructure and bandwidth constraints, providing performance optimization for both typical users and power users.

Pivotal CRM provides a sensible set of commonly needed features out-of-the-box without the excessive depth that makes many other CRM applications inflexible.

Wireless Data Serviceany Gateway

Web-enabled cell phone Wireless PDADemilitarized Zone

(DMZ)

HTTP

Wireless Web ServerIIS

Pivotal Wireless Pivotal Business Server

Wireless Data Request Server

IIS Database

NT Domain

WML MicrobrowserHTML Microbrowser HTTP

orHTTPS(SSL)

Figure 4-2: Pivotal Wireless Architecture

Learn More About Pivotal CRMTo learn more about how Pivotal CRM can help your organization's unique needs, call us today at +1 877-PIVOTAL (+1 877-748-6825) or visit us at http://www.pivotal.com.

Copyright © CDC Software 2007. All rights reserved. The CDC Software logo and Pivotal CRM logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of CDC Software.

Deployability—does the architecture let you easily deploy, upgrade and maintain the CRM application over time?

Pivotal CRM’s presentation tier can employ a zero-install Web browser interface, which means no deployment or maintenance costs are incurred on the client machine. All modifications to functionality, user interface, and data are isolated at the middle tier and seamlessly communicated to the client. This means zero client administration and no user disruption.

With Pivotal CRM, only metadata is upgraded, with all changes to the presentation services, business services, or data services tiers being made in one centrally managed location. Execution and development environ-ments are kept separate and only synchronized when appropriate. Therefore, the application can tolerate a high level of customization without a significant impact on existing applications.

Examined in this light, Pivotal CRM offers a low TCO solution that is not only flexible, scalable and deployable, but also easy to use, thereby lowering training and rollout costs. And with a license to services ratio of 1:2 versus 1:5 (on average) for many other CRM vendors, Pivotal CRM also costs less to implement.4

The result is clear: across the complete CRM lifecycle, Pivotal CRM provides exceptionally low total cost of ownership, while ensuring businesses can customize, integrate, scale and deploy a sensible solution that meets both current needs and evolving goals.

4 Based on current estimated licensing and man-hour costs

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