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CODA embraces the force.com

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19th Sep 2007
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Harrogate-based accounting software house CODA is the first major developer to announce its intention to build an application on top of Salesforce's Force.com on demand software "platform" announced in San Francisco this week. John Stokdyk reports.

CODA chief executive Jeremy Roche flew to California to make the announcement at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference on Monday to alert Salesforce users to the potential of an accounting application that would integrate with their customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

"We decided that we wanted to do for accounting what Salesforce.com has done for CRM," Roche told the conference.

Called CODA 2go, the new product will be a real-time, global finance system delivered on-demand, Stuart Lauchlan reported on " target="_blank">MyCustomer.com. The first release of CODA 2go is expected for delivery during early 2008, and will address revenue management, including creating and managing sales orders, generating invoices, posting cash and cash management. The service will then be expanded to cover procurement and the full range of financial management activities.

"Software as a Service is a logical extension of CODA's 'open platform' commitment," said Roche. "Delivering CODA 2go on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform will allow CODA to offer our product portfolio to a far wider range of businesses. "CODA 2go is a powerful unified ledger accounting system that addresses the needs of organisations from tens of employees to tens of thousands. Good financial control matters to big and small organisations alike."

CODA is the first major independent developer to commit to the new force.com application framework, and will benefit from significant publicity, according to the company's marketing director Dave Turner.

CODA 2go will be a completely new product, based on the on-demand technology base, but it will draw on a CODA integration module that is already available for Salesforce.com users and apply the same functional principles that are applied to CODA's client/server applications. Those products will continue to be developed, and the force.com product will continue CODA's tradition of supporting multiple product variants, Turner said.

"We've always had multiple product streams on the go and felt we needed to commit to software as a service as another tech platform.

Turner explained that CODA had been monitoring and researching the SaaS market and opted to go the force.com route because of Salesforce's strong track record and 33,000-strong customer base. "Those clients represent a obvious target for CODA 2go - having used SaaS applications they will be most likely to adopt SaaS financials," he wrote in the company's Finance Revisited blog.

For those interested in the backroom technology, Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff explained that a new brand was needed to emphasise the company's aspiration to become a "multi-applications" developer.

"We’re talking about the platform as a service," Benioff said.

The Salesforce.com database already handles 44,000 custom applications developed by customers, he explained. "We want them to take care of the innovation and we take care of the infrastructure."

One unfortunate side-effect of the Dreamforce announcement was that it drew attention away from another big CODA announcement - the launch last week of a new generation suite named Neon. Effectively version 11 of CODA Financials, Neon absorbed £15 million of investment and 300 man-years of research, development and testing, according to Roche.

Neon is based around a single-ledger "global finance engine" that is always up to date and in balance and is supported by companion modules for procurement management and invoice mapping, he added in an online webcast.

CODA head of product management Debbie Ashton explained that the Neon family not only adopts the user interface conventions and visuals of Microsoft Windows Vista, it also integrates closely with Office applications. The purchase-to-pay module, for example, can be driven by end-users directly from their Outlook mailboxes. In an online demo, Ashton showed how a purchasing manager getting an email request for a new laptop could click an add-in Request a Quotation command in Outlook to call up the standard CODA request form.

"When the document is created and submitted, it's being saved in real time to the CODA database," she explained.

CODA marketing director Dave Turner admitted that sudden flurry of product announcements was inconvenient, but the Dreamforce conference was too good an opportunity to miss.

He clarified that while Neon represented the end of the first phase of that product's development, "It's not the end of it. We will continue to develop it. It's been in development for two and a half years, and was built on the product that was already there. We think it's the most advanced accounting system in the world and that it will be our bread and butter product for three years.

"We're not going to break the bank by throwing all our chips on SaaS, but we felt it was prudent to start developing that product stream. We're unlikely to generate serious profits from [CODA 2go] for a number of years."

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