CyberSafe: CODA2go’s first customer

Over at Irregular Enterprise, I’ve written a fairly detailed account of a conversation I had with Tim Alsop, technical director of CyberSafe, CODA’s first CODA2go customer for its order-to-cash-process. The story won’t put paid to the saas naysayers who will remind me that this is not a full accounting system but only a limited iteration. That may be true but it is pointing in a direction I find fascinating.

First, CyberSafe makes the point it is not hanging around waiting for incumbent players like Sage (its Line 100 provider) to make the running. It was looking for a solution that builds ON Salesforce.com’s platform and not the other way around. In other words, it is re-engineering its business from a CRM direction and expecting the financial back end to slot in. Usually, businesses look to get the back end financials right first and then build out.

Second, it understands that an engaged community can add value both to the vendor and to customers. That comes across in its ability to develop modest customizations that are commonly required but which are easily done with Force.com’s platform. This sounds like open source but it isn’t. It’s about shared value inside the community. The benefits feed both the vendor and customers.

Third it recognizes that a saas platform provider can provide an easy on ramp for new services when that same provider offers something that helps other developers. It can therefore afford to be relaxed about how CODA introduces new functionality. CODA is able to concentrate on building business logic while Salesforce.com provides the underpinning technical infrastructure. In traditional applications development, the software vendor has to put significant effort into doing all the ‘heavy lifting’ around access and security (for example) before it can write a single line of business code. Having a pre-built platform, developers can come to market much more quickly than would otherwise be the case. Let’s remember that CODA2go has only been in development a modest period of time. We’re not talking 2+ years for any code to emerge. We’re talking less than 18 months and with early customers.

Unlike my Irregular colleague Bob Warfield, I’m not ready to declare saas’s mainstream position quite yet. However, if CODA2go and CyberSafe are a taste of the future then you can be sure we’re looking at big time disruption. And not just in the economics of the saas model.

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Tagged as: Open source, SaaS platform, Salesforce.com, Software as a service