Beyond CRM: Platform ISV finds “Fairsailing” on Force.com
When Colin Cooper first considered developing an application on Force.com, he wondered whether the platform was up to the job. Cooper’s concern centered on the kind of app he had in mind—a branch of HR called human capital management. Could salesforce.com, best known for CRM, also support other classes of applications with its Force.com platform? So Cooper sat down with salesforce.com engineers, pointed to the thorniest sections of his design, and asked: “how would you do this on the Force.com platform?” Today, Cooper’s UK-based company, Fairsail, is piloting its on-demand application at five prospect companies. Fairsail’s suite of tools, all developed on Force.com, help companies “communicate your vision, get the right people in the right job, and develop the right skills.”
“We realized just how serious salesforce.com was about offering a true development platform,” Cooper said. “The Force.com ISV ecosystem is poised to rapidly grow.”
Human capital management is used to manage the changing ways people work with each other, from the pervasiveness of Web communications to the fact that many people now report to more than one manager. “As hierarchical structures no longer work, companies are looking for new ways to achieve a common vision and a strong talent pool,” Cooper said. “Sales and CRM systems look outward from the company; human capital management looks within.” Cooper built his first application for Citibank in the mid-1980s, and after amassing two decades of expertise in the category, launched Fairsail in early 2007. “Salesforce.com has used on-demand to deliver CRM to small and medium sized companies who couldn’t previously afford it. That model is perfect for doing the same with human capital management.” Cooper says the category is a ripe opportunity, growing 40 percent annually with no clear front runner.
Years of development time saved
After concluding that Force.com was up to the task, Cooper got some help by recruiting a small
team of programming consultants with on-demand development experience. They began coding in the
spring of 2007, and Fairsail officially launched at Dreamforce that September. “That’s very fast:
without Force.com, what took us six months would have taken years to accomplish,” Cooper said. “The
platform provided not just the multi-tenant infrastructure, but out-of-the-box capabilities like
workflow and reporting, which every business system like this needs. We would have otherwise had to
write and maintain our own.”
Force.com’s built-in security and scalability were also advantages, giving Fairsail built-in
credibility with its customers. “While not many HR folks have heard of Salesforce, the name
resonates when you start talking with the IT departments who act as gatekeepers. Via the
AppExchange, we can access a market of existing Salesforce customers that already understand the
on-demand value proposition. And as a salesforce.com OEM partner, we can embed the Force.com
Platform Edition and sell Fairsail on its own. That lets us reach new customers and markets where
salesforce.com may be not as well-established, including our European home turf.”
“We also like the network effect of the Salesforce ‘on-demand ecosystem’—the ability to take advantage of other applications running on the same platform. For example, we often link with a company’s payroll system, and there are several partner solutions that make such data integration easy. ”
Apex code and Visualforce are crucial
Fairsail is one of the first applications to use Apex code, which Cooper called “crucial” to
implementing the business logic. “We couldn’t have developed our application without it. If you are
familiar with HTML and JavaScript, and have used either Java or C#, the transition is quite
straightforward. You can begin by defining some objects and screens to produce a simple working
application. From there, you can then learn more advanced parts of the platform.”
Cooper plans to implement Visualforce in the second release of Fairsail, due in summer 2008. “
Visualforce, which is currently available as a developer preview, will give us full control over
the user interface, which is especially critical to this class of software. Our actual end users
are managers, who traditionally resist doing HR-imposed things like setting objectives and doing
performance reviews. So the system has to be so easy to use that managers see it as a help, not a
hindrance. While we have already gone a long way to achieving this through workflow and core
design, the Visualforce version will take us to a whole new level.”
How do I get Started?
The best way to get started is to follow the Force.com Quick Start steps.
