Accorto fast-tracks its way to the cloud with Force.com

What’s the fastest way to launch a new cloud computing application? Veteran software entrepreneurs Kathy Pink and Jorg Janke would tell you that it’s by building on the Force.com cloud platform. Although the two built a platform from scratch at their last company, when they founded Accorto—their latest venture—they decided to use Force.com instead. With salesforce.com’s platform, Accorto was able to quickly launch new cloud applications that help customers manage projects, resources, and financials more efficiently.

Computing before the cloud

Pink and Janke first teamed up in the late ‘90s to found Compiere, a leading developer of Open Source enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Although Compiere’s applications needed an app server, they were accessible to users from any computer with a browser—and were predecessors of today’s true cloud computing applications.

Pink and Janke developed Compiere’s application development platform from scratch. “It was similar to what salesforce.com has done with Force.com,” explains Pink. “When I look back on what we did at Compiere, I’m amazed at how much time we spent at the beginning on things like mail servers, database, servers, backups, and other things that didn’t really add value for the customer.”
 

“It took about 2 years to complete the Compiere platform and get it stabilized,” Pink continues. “But we still had to worry about access, security, reliability, and maintaining the infrastructure. When we started our new venture—Accorto—we didn’t want to do all that again.”  

Charting a new path in the cloud

Pink and Janke were enthusiastic about the cloud computing opportunity. Pink explains, “Cloud computing is moving into all aspects of business. It’s similar to how most companies outsource payroll to their bank instead of buying an expensive solution from ADP. More and more businesses see that with cloud computing they can focus on their core competencies, and not get bogged down with the rest.”

The two entrepreneurs decided from the start that their company should be 100 percent in the cloud, allowing them to use their time more efficiently. “We wanted to focus on our own competencies and on differentiation—not on whether the mail server is going down or when the last backup was done.”
 

The two were already familiar with Salesforce CRM, which was used by the sales team at Compiere. “We knew that salesforce.com had the most robust cloud implementations,” Pink explains. “We attended a local Cloudforce event to take a closer look, and that sold us.”

Faster and easier with Force.com

“We started out by building a small application—Time and Expense Management—as a test case. We wanted to make sure the platform wasn’t going to be down when we needed it and that if we had questions, we could get answers quickly. Everything went well, and then we knew we could go whole hog.”
 

Pink continues, “If we’d decided to build our own platform, we’d still be doing it. But with Force.com, we were able to get our first application out in just 3 months. It wasn’t an extremely complex app, but when you realize that we got over the learning curve and delivered something in that amount of time, it’s pretty amazing. There’s no way we could do what we did with Force.com using Java or .NET.”
 

Pink continues, “Another benefit is how easy the platform is to use. I’m not a developer, and I love that I can do so much with Force.com without writing code. We can bring products to market much more quickly with Force.com.”

Tapping salesforce.com’s partner ecosystem

Accorto has already shipped three applications, all of which are available on the AppExchange online marketplace. “It’s a great place to publish your applications and find new customers,” Pink explains. “The majority of our leads have come through the AppExchange.”

The burgeoning company continues to expand its expertise with salesforce.com training programs. “The certification program was important because it provides potential customers with a very easy benchmark. I’ve done a lot of certifications and sometimes you just attend a class. But at salesforce.com, certification actually means something. You have to pass exams—and it means much more.”

Accorto is also an active participant in the salesforce.com partner ecosystem. “We attended Dreamforce, and I’m one of the coordinators for the Silicon Valley users group. I’m also regularly on the message boards—it’s a great learning experience,” Pink continues. “We’ll continue to use these resources as we add functionality and grow our application to meet client needs.

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