CODA is blogging its progress towards having a financial application built on the Force.com (Salesforce.com) platform offered by Salesforce.com. It's an interesting experiment, reminiscent though on a much smaller scale to the kind of thing I see in the SAP SDN community.
I spoke with Dave Turner, CODA marketing director, about this the other day and he said they're hoping to put as much into the open as they can. This is a great idea because it means they can start to think how they'll build the essential community around this project. They will need to do a lot more than use this device as a honeypot but it is a good start for which they are to be congratulated.
I know what some will say - if they're in talks about being acquired by Agresso then doesn't that event have the potential to kill this project? Not at all. I'll explain later.
It helps of course that Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com has just started a 20 city tour talking about cloud computing. Marc is one of the IT industry's master marketers, able to whip up buzzwords as fast as a Saturn rocket. Yesterday for instance, my colleague Dan Farber sat in on the first of these dog and pony shows in San Francisco. Dan's take:
All roads lead to the cloud (formerly known as "on demand"), and Benioff is trying to herd developers into his cloud with the evolving Force.com platform.
Another colleague, Phil Wainewright added:
Force.com is distinctive, among those dozens that have so far emerged, in its focus on becoming the generic cloud computing development platform for the enterprise domain. Salesforce.com has gone out of its way to make the development experience something that enterprise class developers will be comfortable with.
Knowing what I know, I wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic as Phil but nevertheless, Marc is working hard to build momentum behind Force.com. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how CODA gets on. i'll be watching that space closely.
Oh - I nearly forgot. Another validation against predictions made by AccountingWeb about 2008. (Check my comments to that post.) Ho hum.
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