Alan Perkins
Altium Limited
Morfik's scope is simply amazing!
As part of his role as Chief Information Officer at Altium, it’s Alan Perkins’ job to investigate how new and merging technologies can be harnessed to improve the business. On Alan’s and the CEO’s recommendation, Morfik has become an integral component of Altium’s groundbreaking business platform built with Salesforce.com, the first of its kind in the world.
Alan combines Morfik with the Salesforce.com platform to create high-visibility systems associated with Altium’s human resources and financial management systems designed to provide scenario-based forecasting of people costs, commission calculations, and information to all staff about team costs, outstanding leave details, and performance.
Morfik plays a key role in the project, providing iteration and integration services. Records are pulled from Salesforce using API calls via a WSDL and from SQL Server using ODBC. Data is manipulated and then fed into Salesforce web services for further processing, and is also pulled from Salesforce into Morfik to perform on-demand report processing.
“A rolling 12-monthly people cost forecast can be, for example, produced for the user for a chosen scenario from raw data stored in Salesforce,” Alan explains in more detail. “Users can then drill down into the Morfik-generated page to get more detailed information for a selected section of the overall report or choose from the various forecast scenarios.”
Altium is also using Morfik to generate regular update emails to thousands of selected customers in their first language. Morfik also handles all license management and activations, generating and sending access keys in a variety of requested formats.
“The most exciting thing about Morfik for me is that I can use a traditional object-oriented development approach to get an AJAX-enabled web application, hooking into multiple web services,” says Alan avidly. “It provides an exciting opportunity to leverage all the benefits of a service-oriented architecture without resorting to clunky client-side, handcrafted JavaScript. The productivity leverage it provides is simply amazing.”
“At first I expected a few teething problems with the new, technically ambitious product, but the company is so responsive to any of my concerns,” he adds. “I’ve been developing various systems with Morfik since the earliest betas and it’s wonderful to see how far it has developed. Its potential is enormous.”
“If you’re considering using Morfik, I’d say jump right in and have a go. You’ll be really surprised how much you can do with the technology,” recommends Alan.
