PeopleSoft Alumnus Now Bringing Force.com to Europe

When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft in 2005, one corporate asset decided he wasn't transferrable. In six years, Dan Belwood had worked his way up from junior developer to software architect. But as he rose through the PeopleSoft management hierarchy, his job satisfaction kept sinking—and the prospect of working for an even larger company seemed the wrong direction. Uncertain where to head next, Belwood gave notice, pulled out a map, and began an odyssey that took him all over Western Europe.

He's still there. The Kentucky native now shuttles between London and Paris as director of technology for Sofia Works, a consulting firm that is bringing the power of the Force.com platform to Europe. Belwood is working harder than ever, but he can't complain: the ex-patriot developer is no longer an employee but a co-founder, joining PeopleSoft alumni Frank Seo and Stephen Brown.

Belwood now oversees Sofia Work's R&D staff working out of the London and Paris offices. Because the multi-tenant infrastructure is hosted by salesforce.com, not the customer, developers have no need test their work in the field: an application that works in the lab will work anywhere in the connected world. "With Force.com, I can sit in my flat in the middle of London and start coding," he says. Sofia Works clients include Pitney Bowes, Carnegie Bank, the marketing firm Cosine, and Teach First, whose application won the first annual saleforce.com European Appy Award for non-profits. Most clients employ less than a thousand people—the sweet spot, as far as Belwood is concerned. “We get to develop unique applications, and get them into production quickly without the project management headaches of a larger implementation."

Release early, succeed more often

The inspiration for Sofia Works came from disenchantment with what Belwood calls the Oracle PeopleSoft Siebel market. "In my career, I've seen a magnitude of order more projects fail than succeed," he says. Belwood attributes the problem to long development cycles. "If you spend 18 months on an application, by the time you get it to market, that market no longer exists.” By contrast, he says, the Force.com platform, and cloud computing in general, meshes perfectly with his agile approach to software development. “I like to release early, release often, and that philosophy works particularly well with Force.com because new versions can be distributed to the entire customer base overnight.”

Belwood also likes the low cost of entry that comes with cloud computing. “Your great application idea may still make no economic sense on a traditional platform because of the prohibitive cost of the IT infrastructure. With Force.com, that cost is zero, because everything from the servers to the developer ‘sandboxes’ is maintained by salesforce.com.”

Leveraging Apex and Visualforce

From its launch, Sofia Works has leveraged Force.com to create applications that go beyond CRM, including loan application processing and student recruitment. "The possibilities are limitless: I can create any application imaginable," Belwood says. “With Visualforce, for example, I can control how a user interacts with my application from login to logout. I can even change how an application looks to different classes of users. We are now bringing in people with Web development skills to create applications with a rich user experience. And as they work, they can tap into other programming resources, including all those design patterns from Java and C++.” Sofia Works is now working on internal proof-of-concept applications that it can demonstrate to clients, including user home pages with direct access to Gmail that provide a more meaningful presentation of inbox contents.

The performance of these new applications has benefitted from the latest Force.com technologies. "After rewriting some of the S-controls in Visualforce, some pages are rendered in two seconds, rather than two minutes. The difference comes from not having to make all those server calls across the Internet. With Visualforce, I don’t care how far the actual page is from the data. From my perspective, they are in the same place.”

As for the business logic, Belwood advises developers new to Force.com to first tap the strengths of the Workflow business-logic engine already built into the Force.com platform. "The temptation is to code everything in Apex, because that's what you do in a traditional environment. But often, Force.com Builder will give you most of the business logic you need. And the Apex code you do write will be more terse and expressive, because it will address the exact problem you are trying to solve.”

How do I get started?

The best way to get started is to sign up for the Force.com Free Edition.