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A commentator to one of our recent posts, Getting Agile, asked for more perspective on our development time frame and resources. Following our statement that we have had a team of 14 people working for over 6 months to get CODA 2go product released, he stated that “This is the same sort of time frame I would expect from a ‘traditional’ approach and/or like one based upon .NET. This may be agile but it is not what I would call rapid.”

I think a definition of ‘team’ and the product we are creating will provide some depth to the high level answer I gave at recent Tour de Force events:

At least 14 people have ‘worked on’ CODA 2go. This team consists of Product Management, Architects, Functional and Tecchnical Designers, Programmers, Automated Test Engineers, Testing Engineers, Documentation and Marketing. If you add in legal and corporate representatives, the team would rise above that. However, the core scrum team actually producing the product itself consists of 9 people (5 programmers, 3 testers and 1 on documentation). Other individuals are working on this project as well as others.

Not forgetting, of course, that the accounting knowledge and design brought to bear by the team builds on nearly 30 years of intellectual property represented by CODA. We are a 600 person, 14 country organization, part of the 5th largest midrange software author globally, Unit 4 Agresso.

In the 6 months, the team has created an all new, multi-company, multi-lingual, multi-currency accounting service on Force.com. Not only is it seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but it has an extensive workflow engine, deployment to mobile clients (check out the demos running on BlackBerry and iPhone) and many other advanced features. The application has been stress tested, carries full automated regression testing for future releases and we have created and documented pattern based coding  and best practices for developing on Force.com.

I believe that the benefits we have obtained and the speed of delivery are far more than agile, they are revolutionary.

At the same time as the application has been developed, the extended team has been part of the creation of the business model for Platform as a Service (PaaS) with Salesforce.com as well as creating the legal and operational framework around delivering applications in a PaaS environment.

There are many things that an international application developer like CODA will not cut corners on. Right from the design through the coding and testing and having a full time documenter on the project. What we have created and will continue to build, on is a fully scaleable, unified international accounting solution. I really don’t think you will find many world class business applications built in such an aggressive timescale.

Following on from our post on CODA 2go and Google Apps integration, one of the opportunities I’m excited about is taking the ability to securely pull and push data from force.com into a Google Gadget and combine that with the ability to easily push Gadgets into the iGoogle Portal. 

 

The result would be an already widely used and accepted ‘home page’ that could also include key metrics and reports from back office systems.   Here’s an example of key financial information pushed to iGoogle via Gadgets with data sourced from CODA 2go on force.com .  This is all because we’ll have access to data in a ‘mash-up enabled’ environment.  Exciting stuff!

 

 

Following the recent launch of the Salesforce and Google Apps offerings, we have prototyped our own CODA 2go-specific Google Apps integration! This has been built using a Google Gadget, Apex code and Visualforce and the result has got us and everyone we demonstrated it to at Dreamforce very excited about the possibilities this proof of concept opens up.

Our experience of producing finance software over decades is that accountants love manipulating transactions in spreadsheets! The success of our on-premise CODA-XL product (which extends Microsoft Excel) has been outstanding, with virtually all customer organisations adopting it enthusiastically. Now in the on-demand world we have produced an equivalent solution that uses Google Spreadsheets and Force.com.

The initial prototype can be used to perform a Cost Allocation over extracted transaction details from the CODA 2go product. The user can then apportion new values by editing the cells used by formulas in the spreadsheet; we then post back the results in the form of a journal back into CODA 2go from within the Google Spreadsheet user interface via a Visualforce-powered Google Gadget!

The feedback from prospects, analysts and the guys at Salesforce has proved that this is yet another feature we can offer with CODA 2go that will keep the accountants smiling…

Nearly a week after the official launch of CODA 2go and we’ve been furiously processing the piles of enquiries that we got from Dreamforce in London. If you were one of those who spoke to us you should have had some sort of response from us by now, but if you haven’t please bear with us… we really were inundated…

Meanwhile, we’ve also been enjoying widespread press coverage after the event. It’s been overwhelming, in particular the positive nature of the feedback from analysts and journalists alike is something I’ve certainly never experienced before. Seems most commentators think we’ve made a smart move building on Force.com, and the salesforce.com user community seems to agree.

Highlights include some great pieces by well-known industry bloggers Dennis Howlett (here and here) and and Phil Wainwright, who penned an fairly meaty analysis of the financial implications of Platform as a service…

Other coverage included this, this and this.

We even rattled the ‘gorilla’ in the SMB accounting market, Sage, who responded to a query about CODA 2go from Accountancy Age that CODA ‘didn’t have any brand presence in the SMB space’. All we can say is, ‘keep up the complacency, Sage’!

Well, we did it… CODA’s first totally new finance system for around 15 years was unveiled at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in London on Wednesday. Jeremy Roche from CODA joined salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on stage during the keynote to talk about CODA 2go, the first accounting system to be developed on the Force.com platform, and demo the new application.

Demonstrating software live in front of 2500 people is always a risk, and sure enough the first click of a button produced an error message none of us had seen before. Our development team, watching back in Harrogate via the web, told us later their collective hearts stopped for a moment when that happened! However, turns out that that a glitch in the internet connection had taken the web browser off-line momentarily… so Steve Fisher on keyboards just had to refresh the browser and we were off and running.

The audience was certainly ‘wowed’ by the new offering - the CODA stand was mobbed for the rest of the two-day event. As we’d predicted, the salesforce.com community is hungry for a finance system that works seamlessly with their CRM.

We are currently working with beta partners, but when the solution goes on general release in the coming weeks we’re expecting a considerable amount of uptake. Watch this space, as they say!

Just one day now to the official unveiling of CODA 2go, at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce Europe event in London. Apparently registration broke the 2000 barrier some days ago so there will literally be standing room only when CODA’s CEO Jeremy Roche joins salesforce.com’s boss Marc Benioff on stage.

Jeremy will show some highlights of the ‘opportunity to cash’ process of CODA 2go, and discuss the product strategy and detail of pricing and availability. Shortly afterwards there will be a breakout where delegates can see the product in more detail.

We are briefing press all day today and tomorrow, so watch out for coverage around the world. Well know tech blogger Dennis Howlett got a preview last week and was highly positive - see his commentary on US site ZDnet or his own site, Accman pro.

We’ll blog more news over the next few days…

It’s been my pleasure in the last month to be staffing the CODA 2go booth at the salesforce.com Tour de Force events in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Boston. Its been great to field questions, discuss customer requirements and demo an early, pre-release version of the CODA 2go on-demand accounting application.

CODA 2go is a brand new on-demand accounting system developed from scratch on the Force.com platform - the salesforce.com development platform.

We’ve been quizzed on all aspects of CODA’s history, product development process and functionality but for sure a recurring question has been ‘Is CODA2go integrated with salesforce.com’s CRM?’. The answer of course is ‘Yes’, but somehow somehow integration in my mind conjures up images of shuffling data to and from separate databases or maybe providing hot links between separate applications.

So rather than just ‘integration’ between CODA2go and CRM I think a better description is ‘co-existence’ : the two applications share the same data, security model, reporting tools, workflow engine, etc and as such act as modules of a common suite rather than as separate applications.

You’ll see this co-existence evident throughout the CODA2go application and this will provide huge benefits to existing salesforce.com CRM users. For example:

• Providing a complete 360^o view of an Account: CRM users can not only see sales, marketing and call center history, they can also view invoices and full payment history from the familiar salesforce.com Account tab.
• Tasks, events and approval processes relating to accounting functions can be managed and viewed in exactly the same way of those activities in CRM
• Users can create and manage reports, search lists and filters using their existing knowledge of the CRM application.

So I’ve changed my answer to the question ‘Does CODA integrate to salesforce CRM?’. The answer is ‘No, other applications may integrate with CRM but CODA2go co-exists”!

After my last post, I got a note from Kevin Roberts, our VP Business Development in the US:

“Yes, the ‘Tour de Force’ salesforce.com roadshow commenced last week with events in Atlanta and Chicago and we were there. At both events, there was a packed audience (standing room only!) at the keynote presentations by Marc Benioff and Polly Sumner of salesforce.com, where CODA’s Jeremy Roche discussed the benefits of the Force.com platform for professional developers and ISVs. Salesforce.com’s Adam Gross conducted a live demonstration of a pre-release  version of CODA2go on stage on our behalf, where he walked through the order-to-cash process showing all the neat features we’ve been building into the software. 

CODA also had a stand in the ‘Developer Zone’ where attendees could see close up a pre-release version of CODA2go in action and chat with Jeremy, Steve Pugh and myself. Huge interest and genuine excitement from analysts, potential partners, existing salesforce.com customers and companies large and small.

We’re expecting an even larger turnout this week in New York (Wednesday 16th) before we visit Boston on April 22nd.”

Less than four weeks until the official launch of CODA 2go at Dreamforce Europe, the Salesforce.com user event in London, and the level of excitement is growing, both internally and externally.

This week our CEO Jeremy has been in the US, appearing on stage with Marc Benioff at the Tour de Force events in Atlanta and Chicago. Next week he’s back on stage again in New York. The level of interest in CODA 2go has been massive, with Salesforce users excited by the opportunity for a finance system not just integrated with their CRM but on the same technology platform.

In the first of a series of planned interviews and briefings, Jeremy spoke with Business Week in the States on Thursday; the press coverage will only grow as we get closer to the launch.

As for the launch… well, ‘watch this space’ as they say. Not only is the software looking great, but we’re developing some stunning videos and materials to help people to better understand the solution….