ZenKraft offers shipping enlightenment with FedEx and Force.com
After a number of years in the corporate world, Zeel Jadia and ZenKraft’s other founders were ready to strike out on their own. They decided that cloud computing – which is rapidly gaining momentum in the enterprise world – offered the best long term business potential. After some initial research, the founders determined that the best strategy for quickly and cost-effectively entering the cloud would be to develop an application with Force.com to target the 63,000 companies already using salesforce.com’s cloud-computing solutions.
Getting started with Force.com
The new company was named ZenKraft. According to Zeel Jadia, founder and CTO, “Zen means peace, which is what we hope our applications bring to our customers. And the word ‘kraft’ means strength in German, bringing in strength and stability. Because the opportunities on Force.com are infinite, we didn't want to choose an industry-specific name which would limit what we could build.”
While researching Force.com developer programs, Jadia and team found the idea for the Shipmate application. “We stumbled on a fantastic opportunity on the developer.force.com Idea Exchange. There was no application available to integrate third-party shipping information with Salesforce CRM. We couldn’t believe it hadn’t been done. There’s already a cloud-computing platform – Force.com – that’s solid and easy to integrate with. And FedEx is on the Web. The two services just needed someone to connect them.” When ZenKraft approached FedEx , the company quickly saw the value and got on board with the project.
As ZenKraft’s CTO, Jadia took the lead in developing the new product. His background is at a defense contractor where he worked primarily in Windows and Linux development, and with C, C++, and Java. He had no prior experience with Force.com , the Sales Cloud, or any CRM tools. Still, it didn’t take him long to get started. “Force.com is easy enough to pick up that you can just roll with it and feel at home,” he explains.
The ‘kraft’ of Force.com
ZenKraft’s application was built using Visualforce and Apex code. “It took one and a half developers just six months to code Shipmate,” says Jadia. “That’s a pretty quick turnaround for an app of its size. Doing something this complex on another system would have taken much, much longer. First we would have needed to build the infrastructure to run, deploy, and scale the app. After that we would have had to focus on developing the app itself from scratch. It would have taken years.”
“The cost is also an advantage. The developer org is free. You can start developing with your own environment without paying anything,” explains Jadia. “Shipmate was launched with a low 5 figure investment and we’re breaking even after 6 months: how many traditional software houses can boast that? I estimate that had we used .NET or J2EE and set up our own servers, the total cost may have reached $500k. We wanted to launch our company without the need for investors, and Force.com allowed us to do so. With the low cost and the dramatically reduced go-to-market, we wouldn’t have considered building on any other platform.”
Jadia and team also appreciate the ease of deploying apps built with Force.com. “We don‘t have to worry about whether the customer has the right hardware and the right packages installed. They just click ‘get it now’ and Shipmate will install right away. No configurations necessary. Force.com is the development platform to use if you want to create an app and support it easily with a small number of people.”
Bringing peace to customers
Just a short time after launching, Shipmate already has 40 paid licenses and another 15 companies in trial. Customers appreciate the connectivity between Salesforce CRM and FedEx services. According to Jadia, “With Force.com we were able to bring FedEx to our customers. They were already getting the benefits of CRM; we just added the missing piece of the puzzle.”
Shipmate is 100% Force.com native, so it is seamlessly integrated with the Salesforce CRM UI. Jadia says, “It’s also great to have a platform that is reliable and really steady for cloud computing. It helps us provide a consistent, reliable product. And, it couldn’t be easier for customers to install – from the AppExchange – and use. In fact, it is difficult to tell that we’re a separate app.”
Response to Shipmate has been positive. Jadia says, “Customers love Shipmate. They love the ability to take an opportunity and track it all the way until it is received. It used to be that Salesforce CRM would mark a status as ‘shipping.‘ But now it is all rolled up into one bundle and users can know the actual status. Shipping costs can also be tied into financials, so users can report shipping costs into their opportunities, or look at an opportunity and see everything they’ve already shipped there. Users don’t have to log into two different systems. It’s a huge win.”
Looking to the future
ZenKraft is working closely with both salesforce.com and FedEx to build its customer base. Jadia plans to attend the Dreamforce conference – in a bronze booth – with several FedEx employees to demonstrate Shipmate. The app is already available on the AppExchange, and will also be featured in an upcoming FedEx newsletter, which will be distributed to almost 1.5 million small business users.
Longer term, the company plans to bring a whole suite of shipping applications to salesforce.com, including UPS and USPS. “From there we want to see where our partnerships take us,” says Jadia. “We hope to continue to bring solid solutions to salesforce.com, and be an awesome integration that becomes a key part of the solution.”
When asked what advice he’d give to other small companies getting started with Force.com, Jadia responds, “Make sure you look through developer.force.com and become a fan of the reading material there. And go to a conference and see what other people are doing and what the platform can do – this will help you shape and mold your application. You can also do what we did – check out the Idea Exchange and see what people are looking for to help the platform grow faster.”
How do I get started?
The best way to get started is to sign up for the Force.com Free Edition.
