We’ve got a Salesforce.com Most Valued Professional on the team!

From the West Coast to the West Country: A tech award for Desynit’s Christopher Lewis

Last week, Desynit received some very good news from San Francisco – one of our team, Christopher Lewis, was awarded the role of Most Valued Professional, by technology giants Salesforce.com.  In the words of Salesforce themselves, that means Chris has been recognized as an “outstanding contributor and technological leader in the Force.com cloud platform ecosystems“.

Not bad for a small but agile team of 12, based in Temple Meads.

So how come Chris was selected from over a million active Force.com developers globally, to become one of only 25 Force.com MVPs worldwide (and only 3 in the UK)? And what does this award mean?

First of all, you need to know a little bit about the Salesforce.com platform, and just how important Force.com developers are in this picture. Developers are one of the central pillars in the Salesforce business plan – the importance of these guys should never be underestimated.

“I’ve been developing on the Force.com for five years now, and the way in which the platform has developed has been just mind blowing. Just when you think you’ve reached a limit to what you can do, Salesforce roll out the next level of innovation. This year we saw the launch of Salesforce 1 and the Internet of Things- we no longer need to confine technology to our devices – the opportunities for business are huge. Its an incredible, awesome technology to be working with.”

Christopher Lewis, Advanced Force.com Developer, Desynit

There’s a lot to know, and that’s where the role of Force.com MVP comes in – these are the guys at the forefront of the innovations, signposting other developers building on the platform.  The MVPs are the ones answering the questions, delivering the training, running the developer user groups – in short, leading the community worldwide.

For Salesforce, the concept of community extends beyond the corporate world. They have  a strong philanthropic model at the heart of the business, and encourage their customers and partners to do the same, enabling charities to benefit from the technology. To this end Chris support local Bristol charity ‘Eric‘ in his spare time.

So what’s this going to mean for Chris this year? A lot of work and a lot of fun. As well as all of the great community stuff he already does, he will be playing a role in major Salesforce events eg the Salesforce1 world tour, coming to London’s ExCel 22 May 2014. He will be joining his fellow international MVPs again in San Francisco for the Worldwide Salesforce conference, Dreamforce in October 2014.

What does it mean for Desynit? It confirms to us what we already knew – Chris is an excellent developer and plays a great role in the community. But hopefully it also confirms to our customers that although we may be small, we have a team of key players, at the top of their game.

You can find out more about the Salesforce.com Developer MVP programme worldwide here. If you want to know a little more about the Salesforce Community, there’s some more reading here.