By Remi Poujeaux, SVP of Innovation at Odaseva

This is the first in a series of posts about Salesforce Multi-Org Management

What’s behind the multi-Org trend?

A noticeable trend in the Salesforce world is that companies have more and more instances of Salesforce (called Orgs).

Initially, for sure, a company starts with one Salesforce Org with varying degrees of ambition – ranging from creating a local CRM for a small division in a particular country, up to creating a global platform covering all business and geographies over multiple processes.

This initial implementation grows over time, becoming larger than expected at the start – or sometimes failing its ambition, most often because of unrealistic goals or lack of governance.

But in parallel, other Salesforce Orgs pop up. Reasons for this include:

• Deliberately deciding to give local autonomy over their Salesforce implementations to countries or business units. Local flavors of the process need to be supported with a short delivery time, which is often incompatible with a centralized Org
• Architectural reasons. From an IT and performance perspective, single Orgs tend to grow too big in terms of data, and governor limits are always close. Two small Orgs are more manageable than one big one
• Acquisitions. Integrating a company takes time and chances are that migrating their CRM to the global one is complex as process and data alignment are prerequisites

Moreover, recent data residency laws are accelerating the multi-Org movement. Multinational companies need to split their Salesforce between the U.S., Europe, and China if they want to achieve compliance with strict data residency regulations.

In the end, the result is that a company needs to operate many Salesforce Orgs that come from various origins.

Unification challenges

In this situation, the next natural step is to try to rationalize the Salesforce landscape by unifying all these heterogeneous instances, converging to a single Org. In reality, this proves to be very hard to achieve as the prerequisite is to align the data model and business process across the company, which is a moving target. And there is often no compelling business case to do so from the operational or cost point of view. Residency laws are putting a final stop to this gigantic initiative.

So what are the possible strategies for your multi-Org approach? We will explore this in the next chapter, stay tuned.