Answer
Signals that real-time sync is worth the added complexity usually show up as customer-facing friction: a rep promises a ship date the warehouse cannot actually hit because the CRM order status was six hours stale, or a collections call happens on an account that was paid an hour earlier. Industries with high order velocity, tight credit terms, or frequent same-day service commitments tend to need current data more than businesses running longer sales cycles where daily or twice-daily updates are genuinely sufficient.
On the technical side, real-time or near-real-time sync on IBM i is usually built on journaling and change data capture rather than the CRM polling the database on a schedule, since polling at short intervals puts unnecessary load on production Db2 for i files. Batch sync through scheduled exports is simpler to build, easier to troubleshoot, and lower risk to the core system, which is exactly why it remains the right choice when the business does not actually need minute-level freshness. Buyers should cost out the integration complexity honestly before defaulting to real time, since a journal-based feed requires more monitoring, more careful filtering, and a clearer plan for what happens if the CRM side goes down and the journal receiver fills up behind it.