I consulted (extremely briefly) with a startup whilst they were going through a Salesforce integration. I believe the end goal was to be able to get accurate d

I consulted (extremely briefly) with a startup whilst they were going through a Salesforce integration. I believe the end goal was to be able to get accurate data about... stuff... from which to generate reports, though this was never entirely clear. What it mostly seemed to involve was several developers writing vast swathes of code to map from the existing system to various fields in Salesforce via some sort of horrendous SOAP API, and a business analyst spending a lot of time deciding what those fields were. It seems absolutely impossible, to me, that the benefits gained from all of this in any way outweighed the amount of work and expense it took to do it (I left before they finished, if, indeed, they ever finished). Based mostly on this story, I have successfully dissuaded several startups since from going anywhere near Salesforce, though in one case the exorbitant costs Salesforce quoted did a good job too.