CEO Ted Elliott founded Jobscience with the vision of creating a suite of cloud computing applications that would replace traditional on-premise human capital management technologies. The company released its first Force.com-based HR solutions in 2008, and today it serves hundreds of customers across the globe.
Why did you choose to develop with Force.com?
We started out by hosting our own applications, but we’d occasionally get notifications in the middle of a presentation that our server was down. The stress of the situation could cause a heart attack. We were already a Salesforce customer and the website never went down, so we decided to look into salesforce.com’s platform technology.
We quickly realized Force.com solves all the things we shouldn’t have to solve ourselves, like security models, user permissions, page layouts, and more. We get to work on our solution—putting business processes in place and developing the cool technology to take our products to the next level. With Force.com, we can focus on our customers’ business needs, instead of on infrastructure.
Another benefit is we get to use new platform functionality from salesforce.com as soon as it comes out, and then automatically deliver the latest and greatest to our customers—at no extra charge. There’s no one in the human resource space that’s thinking about how you can use social networking to drive collaboration within an organization—and we’re able to deliver that ability to our customers, thanks to technologies like Chatter.
What’s the advantage of partnering with salesforce.com?
Partnering with salesforce.com has allowed Jobscience to increase the size of our client base by 300 percent last year alone.
We joined the OEM partner program so we could build our products on Force.com and sell them directly to customers without them needing a separate salesforce.com licensing agreement. It lets us get our applications to market quickly, with the freedom to market them however we see fit. Salesforce.com has basically said, ‘We want your customers to be successful, and we don’t want a licensing program to stand in the way of that.’
Salesforce.com is a great partner—and that’s best seen with ISVforce. ISVforce gives Force.com developers the tools we need to manage trials, push upgrades, and distribute on the AppExchange. Salesforce.com has set up the infrastructure that really helps its partners do their jobs.
What’s the best thing about working with salesforce.com?
The speed. Developing with Force.com is 5x faster than traditional platforms, so we can get new products to market in record-breaking time. I recently got a call from a customer who runs a staffing business and needed a new timecard application. I was getting on a flight from Logan (in Boston) to San Francisco, and I was flying Virgin so I had Internet access. I ripped out my laptop and was able to prototype the entire time card system between the time I left Logan and my arrival at SFO. I called the customer the next day and he bought it. You can’t do that with any other platform.
What’s next for Jobscience?
As we’ve closed bigger and bigger deals, we’ve had to address new areas of functionality—integrating with existing calendaring systems, tracking the offer process, and managing compliance. But Force.com is so flexible that we’ve been able to build a full talent management suite that is completely driven by customer needs.
We’re watering at the mouth about Siteforce because we’re planning to use it as the foundation of our mobile strategy. Then we can take our solution to a whole new level. We’ll be able to build all our apps and connect the inside and the outside of the business with just one set of tools.