Overcast Technology

Overcast is a fully maintained business application on top of Salesforce delivering end-to-end business processes across Salesforce and SAP.

The Overcast Solution Architecture

With the advent of Cloud software and the Internet-of-Things, expectations to connect not only applications but also employees and business partners in entirely new ways are increasing rapidly. As a result, enterprise and integration architecture models are evolving very fast from the tightly coupled monolithic architectures at the beginning of the century to much more modular models. “Integration” based on loosely coupled APIs is the key to digital transformation, more important than ever and requires new approaches.

Overcast was designed for this new world and solves the uniquely complex task of integrating highly-complex enterprise software solutions such as SAP. Today, Overcast is the only solution that allows for application integrations that have zero footprint on the backend system. In addition, Overcast’s unique mixed replication/real-time architecture reframes how integrations are designed as it allows to integrate by reference rather than by copying data (something that can be very hard to do and maintain). All this is possible now without writing code.

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The Overcast Integration App redefines Salesforce integration through its mixed replication/real-time architecture: an elegant, modern architecture that reduces integration complexity & risks significantly. Think of it as a Salesforce app that provides a data access layer for on-premise data and processes rather than being a middleware.

A Salesforce-native App

Overcast for Salesforce is 100 percent cloud native and built as a Salesforce.com application. It is installed as an app from the Salesforce app store and all its user interfaces, database tables and logs are in Salesforce. We manage, update and maintain the software and infrastructure, all for a competitive monthly subscription fee.

Leverages your Salesforce know-how

Once installed – from within Salesforce.com – introspect your SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and other on-premise applications for available APIs, views/tables, or files. After activating you can interact with your backend in Salesforce using the Salesforce tools: map data to Salesforce objects, hook up workflows, use Process Builder, or write your own APEX code to manipulate the data.

The Fastest and Safest Way to Integrate

Being native to Salesforce greatly reduces integration complexity and your staff does not need to learn a third party tool where you create more business logic that you have to adjust each time you want to make a change in the future. Its architecture is simple by design and thus drastically reduces complexity, project risks and points-of-failure. Installation, on premise connectivity and the first production-ready integrations can be realized in hours.

Focused & Enterprise-grade

Overcast focuses on enterprise-grade integrations between Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, etc and does this really well – rather than trying to be all things for all integrations. Overcast provides the missing, secure link from the Salesforce cloud to the on-premise world and is the only solution that provides true real-time, properly authenticated integration to the backend, and automatically simplifies that backend complexity (e.g. SAP) to provide an amazing ease-of-integration.

The Overcast Difference

Overcast drastically reduces the cost and speed of integrating SAP by reducing project complexity and risks

Rather than implementing a third layer, Overcast is built on the Salesforce platform as a Salesforce app, automates most integration steps and provides 80%+ of typical integration requirements out-of-the-box already. The benefits include that you do not have to manage a complex project where three sub-teams need to talk to each other – the Salesforce admin can do the integration on his own and talk to the SAP expert in his language. Integrations done this way are thus much faster to implement! This is made possible because Overcast was designed for SAP integration and works seamlessly with the public SAP APIs.

INTEGRATION CONTENT AS A SERVICE

Vigience Overcast provides ready-to-use application software as a service in the form of its Overcast Components grouped into 8 solutions. These data synchronization as well as the real-time UI and business process integrations are fully supported by Vigience. Not just the integration platform but the maintenance of the actual complex integrations are outsourced to Vigience!

With other iPaaS platforms, you get a few sample templates but building out the complex integration has to be done in a customer project – a task so difficult that integrations often cost millions and take years. Alternatively, integrations that go beyond data exchange are simply not implemented and the business benefit of having a modern CRM system is never fully realized.

METADATA-DRIVEN FRONTEND INTEGRATION

CRM and ERP business processes are fundamentally inter-connected cannot live on their own. As a result, deep Salesforce and SAP system integration is a must like with no other two systems alike. However, building out complex integrations from scratch between Salesforce and the highly complex SAP ERP systems is prohibitively complicated as well as extremely time & resource-intensive.

Issues when building integrations from scratch: the more data that is replicated, the more business logic will need to be replicated. On the other hand, realizing business process integrations and UI mashups also leads to a lot of complex code.

All this custom code needs to be maintained over the next 10-20 years with a dedicated team.

Overcast provides a powerful framework for frontend integration projects:

1.Build on a proven integration design right from the start of the project and keep your solution architecture clean and free of risk (most IT problems stem from a bad design)

2.Avoid writing thousands of lines of custom code or script that will make your solution architecture rigid and hard to maintain (will your star developer be here for you in 10 years to maintain the code?)

OVERCAST AND MULESOFT

Overcast & Mulesoft solve different problems and complement each other

How does Overcast differentiate itself from Mulesoft (or similar products like SAP CPI)? Overcast focuses on frontend integration but requires “good” APIs to work (as are e.g. provided by an SAP ERP backbone). For the fully API-encapsulated SAP ERP, Overcast offers ready-to-use SAP integrations that are provided as a service, i.e. fully supported SAP-connected mini-applications. Mulesoft, on the other hand, focuses on API development & management including API throttling, monetization and security but provides no solution on how to consume that API from within a Salesforce process. You will have to build the actual business process integrations yourself.

The good news: Overcast & Mulesoft can work together! While Overcast can call backend systems directly, it makes sense to connect via Mulesoft if there is no clean Process API provided by the backend. In that case, Mulesoft can API-enable the backend system and Overcast can call that new Mulesoft-based APIs. Use Mulesoft to build your APIs and use Overcast to consume the APIs in Salesforce and do the frontend application integration.

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INTEGRATION VIA SAP PI

Overcast typically communicates with SAP ERP directly via SAP standard Business APIs (BAPIs & RFCs) – the same way SAP applications interact with each other. That is extremely performant and there is no overhead. The BAPIs apply business logic and do authorization checks.

However, when desired, the Overcast App and the Overcast Components can also optionally integrate with SAP through SAP PI, SAP PO or SAP CPI (“SAP PI”) and leverage existing integrations that you may have already built.

Overcast can call SAP PI web services with ease and also receive change triggers from SAP PI, in order to “push” data from SAP to Salesforce.

For the pre-built, pre-integrated Overcast Components to work via SAP PI, the required SAP BAPIs need to be exposed via SAP PI upon specifications provided.

DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS

Embedded deployment (default)
DAL deployment: install Overcast into the Salesforce organization where the data is used and integrate by copy or by reference. Leverage the many Overcast Components.

Central hub deployment
iPaaS-like deployment: install Overcast into a central Salesforce instance and synchronize data across all systems and build real-time APIs against any backend.

SECURITY AND ON-PREMISE CONNECTIVITY

Overcast is built upon an underlying concept of not holding onto data which removes the whole class of security issues around data at rest. Overcast is unique in that it does not even store system credentials. These are provided in encrypted form by the customer’s System-of-Engagement during the invocation of an integration scenario. This coupled with Overcast’s use of code signing means that the Overcast does not become a prime attack point for hackers (unlike other iPaaS/ESBs). Furthermore, all network communications are protected by military grade encryption, network connections are only accepted from/made to pre-registered endpoints for your organisation, and only world class data centers with appropriate infrastructure certifications are used.

All interactions with the System-of-Record use appropriate user credentials that can be mapped on a per-(System-of-Engagement)-user basis and so you are not forced to create a dedicated integration user and give it the ever-growing superset of required authorisations.

Overcast can communicate with your System-of-Record either over a hardware/software VPN network or download the lightweight Overcast Secure Agent and establish a secure gateway.

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Performance and Scalability

Overcast’s simple architecture and focused approach to enterprise-grade integration means that its runtime performance profile is very fast and the bottleneck is the API of the systems being connected. The Overcast Service on its own moves 1 million records from SAP to SQLServer in under a minute!

At its core it is a secure, authentication based integration platform that performs protocol conversion between the systems, maps to appropriate types in appropriate objects and only adjusts values where absolutely necessary (e.g. try putting SAP’s typical date of “31st December, 9999” into Salesforce!).

Overcast synchronous integrations can also return results directly rather than inserting the results into System-of-Engagement objects (making it easy to build responsive web applications that are directly involved with your hybrid business process).

Also, thanks to the simple architecture of the Overcast servers, it is very easy to both scale-up and scale-out. It maintains minimal state and can be readily scaled-out by simply adding more nodes to the Overcast cluster. New nodes automatically configure, download the latest metadata, and register themselves. They are then instantly usable in a load-balanced production environment.

The #1 Salesforce-Native Integration App

Overcast is a Salesforce-native cloud integration service that lets you quickly and easily connect Salesforce to your SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and other on-premise applications.
No on-premise software or middleware installations.
Thousands of SAP business objects can be integrated in a point-and-click fashion.