At CODA we are heavily into the implementation of design patterns within our Java and .Net based products, and as such found ourselves quickly wanting to benefit from them on the Salesforce platform as we embarked on our CODA2go project to build a new Finance system. To date we have implemented Domain Model, Unit of Work, Identity Map, Lazy Load, Data Mapper and Service Layer. The platform also provides a solid implementation of the Model View Controller pattern through its new Visualforce technology.

It’s very likely that CODA is amongst the first, if not the first software vendor to implement these patterns on this platform and I’m pleased to say despite the infancy of the Apex language they have taken very well. For those unfamiliar with design patterns, think of them as generic cook books for developers that describe solutions and strategies to building well structured and critically, well defined, consistent and thus maintainable implementations. This Wikipedia article is a good general reference. The above links are taken from Martin Fowler’s excellent site.

Implementing these patterns alongside a representation of our product’s domain model has also been critical to our desire to keep code relating to aspects such as business logic, data representation, querying, persistence and user interface code separate. This approach has been base architecture design for all CODA products ever since our first client server application, CODA-Financials.

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We announced a couple of weeks ago that we had already completed development of the end-to-end sales invoicing process for CODA 2go.  Hitting that milestone was a real validation of our approach to developing the application - the combination of CODA’s 25+ years experience in developing international accounting systems, combined with the Force.com technology platform, is allowing us to deliver a robust on-demand finance application at a good speed.

Sales invoicing represents a successful first development phase, and there are more process areas to come before we get to the first release of the product, but it now gives us some product to start talking to beta clients about.

Meanwhile the platform keeps improving (see our comments on the Salesforce announcements) and our experience with the platform is growing. The level of drive and excitement inside CODA is stronger than ever, and only matched by the anticipation in the market. 

As always, watch this space…

Being an ISV working on the Force.com platform has, its fair to say presented a few challenges we didn’t expect to face, relating to things we take for granted within an ISV development environment on previous platforms. Such as team working, source control management, overnight builds, packaging and deployment out to our internal teams. Since starting the project last year, we’ve worked closely with Salesforce to create the best solution we could using the tools we’ve had to date, allowing us to progress through a number of sprints successfully.

With their recent announcement we finally see a true ISV focused development toolset emerge.

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When we at CODA started to look at creating an on-demand (SaaS) accounting system, it was clear that it would allow us to address the needs of much smaller organizations than we have ever done with our traditional ‘on-premise’ software and service model.

That was exciting for us, but also a challenge since we’d not operated extensively in that area of the market before. We focused on what’s different about the needs of smaller companies. And we quickly came to an important conclusion – organizations may be small, but that doesn’t mean their needs are simple.

Realising that even small businesses demand sophisticated functionality was actually great news for us… because CODA’s been supporting companies with highly complicated requirements for decades. With the on-demand approach, we have a way of delivering it to smaller user bases efficiently and simply. We just need to make sure that the software is so easy to set up and use that it doesn’t require armies of accountants and technical people.

Surely that’s not rocket science?

So when we announced CODA 2go, we made a simple, bold statement:

“CODA will do for accounting what Salesforce has done for CRM.”

By which we mean, we’re going to deliver enterprise level accounting sophistication to small and medium organizations.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it!

Well, watch this space…

Back in September last year, CODA’s CEO Jeremy Roche stood on stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference in San Francisco and announced that we would develop a world class accounting system on Force.com. It was a big moment for us, and around the world we quickly met the question – why partner? And why Salesforce?

What we launched that day was a strategic partnership to develop a new, on demand financial management application, called CODA 2go. It will be aimed at organizations of around 25 employees and above, and will take the best of CODA’s existing design including the unified ledger and multi-everything capabilities.

You can see from our developer blogs on this site that we’re well under way with the development and making great progress. Which partly answers one of the questions - we partnered because we felt that was the best way of producing a proven, robust architecture that was designed specifically for the SaaS market – in an acceptable timeframe.

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The rise in availability and demand for SaaS solutions might seem a reason for IT staff to be afraid. After all, if major enterprise applications start moving out of the company IT centre and are simply rented over the internet, does the IT team get shrunk down until they just have to keep the internet connection plugged in?

Certainly some IT organizations seem to be resisting the growing interest in SaaS, with claims in 2007 that up to two-thirds of companies were missing out on the potential advantages of a SaaS solution due to the IT department’s reluctance to consider it. Fears over security, lack of control and availability (‘up-time’) are often cited as reasons for not considering an on-demand approach to meeting a corporate challenge.

However, IT professionals may be worrying unnecessarily. Fears over security and availability can be countered by simply looking at the facts, with suppliers like Salesforce.com able to boast impressive figures that would rival most internal IT functions.

So what of the perceived threat to IT jobs?

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We’re now several weeks into the implementation phase of CODA 2go and have really started to get into the depths of the Force.com platform. 

CODA has a strong investment in web technologies mainly based around Java and .NET and the move to a on-demand solution built on a new platform is both an exciting opportunity but also a technical challenge. 

The technical focus of the project started with a trip to salesforce.com which gave us an insight into the architecture of Force.com and provided valuable connections to the key figures in their development team. The visit also allowed us to promote the needs of an enterprise level ISV to salesforce.com. 

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