Get a Holistic View of All Your Customer Data in Salesforce—in Real Time

Salesforce customer data remains the heartbeat of customer engagement for many organizations. Yet, a critical missing piece is often access to the rest of your customer data that lives in other systems like ERP platforms, financial databases, and legacy applications.

Relying solely on native Salesforce data means your teams are working with an incomplete picture. While Salesforce offers tools like Salesforce Connect to bridge this gap, the complexity and cost of implementation can outweigh the benefits. What if there was a simpler, scalable way to achieve a holistic customer data integration in Salesforce—without the headaches?

The cost of incomplete customer context

When customer data is fragmented across systems, every team is affected. Marketing can’t personalize outreach, sales teams operate without the full picture, and support teams are left without critical context.

These silos introduce friction into the customer experience and make it harder to act quickly or accurately. A complete Customer 360 view isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity for personalization, customer satisfaction, and long-term loyalty. But to achieve that, you need real-time customer data that includes systems far beyond Salesforce.

Why Salesforce Connect falls short

Salesforce Connect offers a way to integrate external systems into Salesforce, but its pricing model makes scaling difficult. Each system—whether Oracle, DB2, or Workday—requires a separate license, which can amount to several thousand dollars per month.

Even with the necessary licenses in place, implementing Salesforce Connect requires continuous IT effort and ongoing configuration. As your ecosystem grows, both costs and complexity increase significantly. Each new integration adds layers of monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintenance to ensure data remains accurate, secure, and performant.

This growing operational burden can quickly overwhelm IT resources, making it difficult for many enterprises to scale their integrations effectively. Ultimately, these challenges create a significant barrier to achieving the comprehensive, 360-degree customer view that organizations strive for.

A smarter approach: The enterprise semantic layer

Rather than connecting each data source individually, an enterprise semantic layer provides a centralized, governed way to access multiple systems in real time—without replication.

The data virtualization capabilities allow to integrate multiple systems—like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, and Workday— once and access as a unified dataset. CData Virtuality enables this by creating a single, real-time access point between Salesforce and any data source.

This approach not only reduces licensing costs but also streamlines IT operations. For example, companies like AGF have used CData’s platform to combine multiple sources into a single OData connection, avoiding the need for separate Salesforce Connect licenses.

“Using data virtualization [capabilities in a semantic layer solution] let us combine those two sources into one… saving us from multiple licenses.” — AGF, CData customer

By keeping the data in place and making it accessible on demand through a semantic layer, enterprises minimize IT overhead, simplify governance, and avoid redundancy—preserving data integrity with a single source of truth. At the same time, preventing unnecessary data copies enhances security and reduces the risk of unauthorized access and data leaks.

Customer 360 without the complexity

An enterprise semantic layer also makes a true customer 360 possible by turning Salesforce into a single, governed access point for all customer-related data—without copying or moving it. This approach delivers unified, real-time visibility while keeping full control over who can access what, and when.

The benefits are far-reaching: business teams gain instant access to the full customer context for better decision-making and personalization, while IT reduces the complexity of onboarding new sources and avoids the pitfalls of fragmented, brittle integrations.

How this helps data analysts and IT teams

For data analysts and IT teams, the impact is immediate. With easier, faster access to external data directly in Salesforce, analysts can work with complete, real-time customer data without delays.

IT teams benefit from a dramatic reduction in manual integration work, as new systems can be connected once through the semantic layer and made instantly available in Salesforce.

This eliminates the need for redundant data storage, lowering infrastructure and maintenance costs, while providing seamless connectivity to a wide range of systems like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Workday, and more—all without custom coding or point-to-point integrations.

CData Virtuality simplifies assembling a complete, cross-system customer view

CData Virtuality streamlines the creation of a unified, 360-degree customer view by integrating Salesforce data with information from any external source—regardless of format or location. Acting as an independent semantic layer, it connects to over 300 data sources in real time, removing the need for costly migrations, complex point-to-point integrations, or heavy IT overhead.

This approach accelerates insight generation, reduces storage requirements, and ensures data governance and security by keeping sensitive information in place.

As your data ecosystem expands, CData Virtuality serves as a central hub—enabling seamless connections to new data sources and delivery platforms without disruption. This flexibility supports real-time analytics, operational agility, and strategic decision-making, all while keeping IT management lean and scalable.