Get Salesforce insights in BigQuery for unified analytics powered by Datastream

Many businesses today use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, choosing them for their accessibility, scalability, and to reduce infrastructure overhead. These cloud-based tools provide immediate access to powerful functionality, allowing companies to streamline operations and focus on core business activities. 

However, as companies grow and their data needs expand, they often find their SaaS data scattered across multiple applications. This is a significant hurdle, because when valuable information is siloed, it’s hard to generate a holistic view of business performance and make informed, data-driven decisions. Further, the SaaS provider landscape is fragmented — each has its own unique APIs, authentication methods, and data formats. This creates a complex integration challenge characterized by significant development effort, high maintenance costs, and potentially, security vulnerabilities.

Integrating data to establish a unified view 

Salesforce Data Cloud (SFDC), a leading customer relationship management (CRM) solution, is a commonly used SaaS application that provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions, sales activities, and marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to identify trends and predict future behavior. But as enterprises accelerate their cloud modernization initiatives, organizations struggle to efficiently, reliably, and securely extract data from Salesforce. 

Yet, achieving a truly unified view of that data is imperative. Consolidating SaaS data with operational data is not merely beneficial, but essential, providing the holistic perspective needed for decisive action, operational efficiency, and profound customer understanding. Consequently, the desire to leverage Salesforce data within Google Cloud for advanced analytics and generative AI is strong. However, realizing this potential is hindered by the significant complexity of the required integrations.

To help, we recently expanded Datastream, our fully managed change data capture (CDC) service, to support Salesforce as a source. Now in preview, this simplifies connecting to Salesforce, automatically capturing changes and delivering them to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and other Google Cloud destinations. We currently support real-time data replication from operational databases such as Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. By extending this support to Salesforce, customers can now easily merge their Salesforce data with other data sources to gain valuable insights.

Key benefits of Datastream

Support for Salesforce Data Cloud rounds out the Datastream offering, which provides a number of capabilities:

• Better decisions and actionable intelligence: With Datastream's low-latency replication, you can provide your business with up-to-the-minute insights from your Salesforce data.

• Scalability and reliability: Datastream scales to handle large volumes of data, providing reliable replication.

• Fully managed: No need to manage infrastructure or worry about maintenance, freeing your team to focus on core tasks.

• Multiple authentication methods: Salesforce connectivity in Datastream supports both OAuth authentication and username and password authentication.

• Support for backfill and CDC: Datastream supports both backfill and CDC (change data capture) from Salesforce source.

Get started with Salesforce source in Datastream 

Integrating Datastream with Salesforce lets your business use Salesforce CRM to gain a comprehensive view of your data. By replicating data to Google Cloud for analysis, businesses can unlock deeper insights, improve accuracy, and streamline data pipelines. Learn more in the documentation.