How to connect MQ Bridge and Salesforce events

In March, Salesforce and IBM announced a strategic partnership. The partnership reflects that many large corporations have investments in technologies from both Salesforce and IBM. A common scenario at some of these corporations: the applications used by customer-facing staff were not tied to the enterprise systems of record. So a key aim of the partnership is to make it simpler to integrate applications and systems.
Salesforce has an event-based interface. Wouldn’t it be good to have Salesforce applications sending events data into the enterprise IT systems? Could a company benefit from exposing systems of record data directly into a Salesforce application as an external data source?
One of the fruits of the partnership is the MQ Bridge to Salesforce delivered in IBM MQ 9.0.2. The bridge enables event data sent from the Salesforce platform to be re-published as MQ messages that can easily be processed by enterprise applications.
MQ customers are used to events being delivered as messages. So an intuitive way to integrate Salesforce’s events is to turn them into MQ messages.
MQ Bridge connects your Salesforce events to your back-end systems and applications.
There are two kinds of events supported by the MQ bridge: PushTopics events and platform events.
PushTopics are queries you define to receive events when changes are made to data in Salesforce. You specify the kind of data conditions in which you want the events generated and the data you’d like included in the events. For example, you might want an event generated every time a new contact is created.
Platform events are customizable event messages that you define in Salesforce containing whatever data you like. Once defined, you send platform events directly from application code in Salesforce. Platform events are much more flexible. For example, you can include any data in your event that you like and create a distributed application, part of which runs in Salesforce and part of which runs in your enterprise data center.
Each PushTopic and platform event type corresponds to a separate topic that the MQ Bridge to Salesforce can use receive events.
Bridge the gap with the MQ Bridge
Here’s a hypothetical scenario.  Let’s assume you already use Salesforce to manage relationships with your customers. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with an order, and the customer is expressing their frustration over the phone to someone on your team. How can you make your customer happy again, quickly?
As your team member is logging the call with the customer, they flag a record in Salesforce triggering special treatment for this customer. By registering a PushTopic that matches this flag, an event will flow across to MQ. There, the event can be picked up by a back end system to take an appropriate action, such as applying a promotion for the customer’s next order.
With the MQ Bridge, it’s easy to close the gap between the Salesforce applications and back end systems. You can enhance the experience you offer your customers with minimal impact on existing systems.
The MQ Bridge to Salesforce will likely run on the edge of the data center, connecting to Salesforce on the cloud and to an enterprise queue manager. The bridge itself is available on Linux x86-64, but it can connect to any queue manager running MQ 7.0 and later.
If you know MQ and want to experiment with the bridge, it’s easy to sign up for a no-cost 30-day trial of Salesforce here.
Learn more about how the IBM and Salesforce partnership can help your business.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud