Geek of the Month
September 2008
 | Geek of the Month: Jesse Greenwald
Company: Pervasive Software
Location: Austin, TX
Website:www.pervasive.com
Industry: Software Integration
Development language of choice: Anything that gets the job done
Tool that saves me time: IDE for Java
Beverage that keeps me coding: Water, with espresso a very, very close second
Words to live by: “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” -Walt Disney. (“That’s what my bosses do expect.”) |
The ability to take multiple disparate resources and connect them together into a seamless software solution is what gets Jesse Greenwald at Pervasive Software going every day.
A graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, Jesse started as an intern at a local electrical engineering firm. Shortly thereafter, he moved on to his first full-time position where he created reports, analytics and metrics for a start-up recruitment firm. When the firm’s fortunes turned chilly Jesse found it necessary to move his career to another company. There he took on the responsibility of building a reporting framework, a capability new to that organization. A continued economic slowdown meant that once again it was necessary for him to move on. This time he got lucky. This time he found the stability he was looking for at Pervasive Software.
Moving into New Realms
Based on his strengths in Java development, Jesse joined Pervasive’s Partner Enablement Group, which helps the company’s channel partners sell various Pervasive products. An important thing Jesse learned at his earlier gigs was the critical need companies have for systems integration. As a new member of Pervasive, Jesse’s first assignment was to develop custom connectors that enabled two software applications to speak to each other. Impressed with his skills, his boss recommended Jesse when the head of Pervasive’s new DataSolutions integration group came looking for talent.
For Jesse, the DataSolutions division offers a real entrepreneurial environment in which innovative thinking is encouraged. Integration as he knows it today was fairly new to Jesse when he joined DataSolutions. That made discovering the division’s integration toolkit and vast storehouse of knowledge a tremendous find.
These tools and the accompanying expertise were to play an enormous role in one of Jesse’s first major DataSolutions projects: integrating Intuit® QuickBooks® Merchant Service credit card processing with salesforce.com.
New Revenue Streams by Integrating QuickBooks Merchant Service
Pervasive had already created nine other integration and data syncing products for salesforce.com’s CRM products. And out of that, the biggest issue, or rather, opportunity they saw was the fact that Salesforce had no system in place for storing information such as payment records or transactions. For DataSolution’s management, they viewed adding the credit card processing abilities of QuickBooks Merchant Service to Salesforce as a natural extension.
Before Jesse got started on the project, Pervasive had already established an initiative that focused on developing new ways to make their integration technologies very solutions-oriented. He describes the goal of the project as “making the QuickBooks Merchant Service solution able to be downloaded and used by non-technical customers with minimal or no help from technical support.” And according to him, with their QuickBooks Merchant Service integration application they’ve succeeded, thanks largely to Intuit’s QuickBooks Merchant Service SDK.
QBMS SDK and IDN Staff make Smooth Integration Possible
For Jesse, the primary challenge of the project was to create a reusable framework surrounding the QuickBooks Merchant Service SDK that would enable Pervasive to communicate not only with Salesforce but with future CRM packages as well. “We wanted to leverage our existing Pervasive Data Integrator to create a very flexible and robust system to communicate with the Intuit Gateway,” he says.
Jesse says that Intuit’s QuickBooks Merchant Service SDK helped his efforts tremendously, and enabled him to complete the task within 60 days of starting.
The well-documented examples found in the QuickBooks Merchant Service SDK offered Jesse a good framework with which to get going, and provided him with enough information to become productive right away. He says that “the sample communications and the XML messages that the kit contains, plus the QBXML tester and validator were all very beneficial to the development effort, allowing us to ensure that our communications with Intuit were meeting the standard QBXML format.“
Another key element to which Jesse attributes his success is Dinesh Katyal, Senior Product Manager, and his team at the Intuit Developer Network. “IDN provides a very large support structure to surround the development environment,” Jesse says, “so when you do stumble across a challenge you don’t feel lost. There are always people at Intuit who are available to help you.” In Jesse’s eyes, Dinesh and his groupproduced very robust requirements for the project, and provided instrumental help throughout the development of the Pervasive application, making available resources for phone conversations and documentation surrounding the SDK.
IDN Forums a Big Help
Jesse also turned to the alternate resource channel the IDN forums for additional resources.
“I found that the most useful comments come directly from Intuit employees that post on the forums,” he says. “The little guides or undocumented tips, stuff like that, are pretty valuable.” the forums had more than enough posts by Intuit employees and developers that covered the topics so he was able to get what he needed. “The forums have been my number one focus,” Jesse says.
The initial response to Pervasive’s new integration between QuickBooks Merchant Service and Salesforce has been very positive, and customers are asking for enhancements to make the application even more useful. Jesse and his co-workers are already working with Dinesh Katyal and his team to make those requests happen.
“I can’t say enough about IDN and the QuickBooks Merchant Service SDK,” Jesse concludes. “Their tool set is well developed, the level of expertise within the support staff is really above average and their willingness to help us is always a positive experience. It is always a pleasure to be working with Intuit.”
For More Information
All IDN members can learn more about the QBMS SDK, download it, and access release notes on the new QBMS developer web site.