Wells Fargo faces challenges integrating Peoplesoft CRM with their legacy systems.

Wells Fargo Private Client Services wanted to integrate their trust, brokerage and private banking customers into a single CRM system and chose Peoplesoft's CRM suite.

Unfortunately, PCS is not the only group interacting with the customer, and in order to be effective, the CRM implementation must integrate with the CRM systems in other groups.

A few years ago, the enterprise team created a web services infrastructure to facilitate cross group data sharing and to centralize customer data storage. While this works great in theory, problems began to arise because Peoplesoft CRM is not designed to have it's data layer external to the application.

After a huge amount of effort, the development team was able to get CRM to interface with the enterprise web services for single customer lookups. However, it was then discovered that since the customer data was not local to the database, doing any type of reporting or grouping of customers was impractical. Useful CRM functions like showing a sales professional's top ten clients were not possible.

As part of the web services infrastructure, the enterprise team pushed the strategy of not replicating data unless absolutely necessary. Even if the PCS team decided to replicate the customer data from the enterprise system to CRM, they would be trying to synchronize hundreds of gigabytes of data on, at best, a nightly basis.

Luckily, PCS had implemented CRM on DB2 on the IBM pSeries platform. TitaniumSea's solution to the problem was to use IBM's Information Integrator product (similar to BEA's Liquid Data), to trick CRM into thinking it's data was local even though most of it was stored centrally on the mainframe. Report queries ran nearly as fast as when the data was local, but with the benefit of having up to the minute data and without the enormous complexity of keeping the data synchronized.

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