It’s now confirmed that we will be launching CODA 2go at Dreamforce Europe, salesforce.com’s big user and developer event in London in May.

 Jeremy Roche, CODA’s CEO will be on stage for the keynote with salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to make the announcement, and that will be followed by a breakout session where attendees can see the first accounting system developed on Force.com, for the first time.

We’re certainly pumped up about this opportunity, and the team at salesforce also seem very excited by our new development. Can’t wait to get feedback from the audiences…

As you’d expect the pros and cons of SaaS continue to be debated, nowhere more than on developer.force.com area of Salesforce’s website

A recent post by their resident commentator Peter Coffee takes up the angle of how challenging it can be to recruit and retain key IT staff (or wetware, to use a nasty piece of jargon he uses…). It’s certainly an interesting and relevant argument when assessing the cost and risk of on-premise versus on-demand software.

In the comments that follow our own Kevin Roberts poses an objection we sometimes hear, around the risks of dependancy on a platform supplier for developers like CODA.

Peter’s response is a fair one, and fits with our own thinking - there might be a small risk, but the advantage of speed to market is a massive one and at least lets you test a product faster and more cheaply than developing your own independent platform. You can always choose to do that later on…

And as Kevin points out on the blog, you have to hope that a million Salesforce.com users can’t all be wrong, can they?

This time last week we had no apparent ability to handle the classic CODA multis of multi-currency and multi-company on the salesforce platform.  Today we have a fully demonstrable solution, with some further worries about data security resolved beyond doubt.

Prior to that time we had spent several weeks researching the Force.com platform, explaining our requirements to our contacts at Salesforce and working through various proposals and counter-proposals. It was like trying to solve a problem that needed a high degree of collaboration and communication in a serial manner through a narrow bandwidth pipe. We even proposed a 2-3 hour conference call with the Force.com team but somehow with the time difference and conflicting schedules we could never make it happen. And the beat of our development drum was moving on, we already missed one deadline for clarity on currencies that meant we were starting sprint 6 with some assumptions whose validity was not proven.

Clearly we had to meet face to face with the Force.com team. Read the rest of this entry »