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A partner's history matters because it shows how the company behaves under pressure. Honesty about what you have not done yet, a "whatever it takes" reflex and a preference for building over talking all trace back to the first years of Planet of Commerce. They also explain why we answer questions about choosing the right Salesforce consultant with behaviour first and credentials second.
A developer who liked building things
Bruno was a creative and geeky kid who wrote his first lines of code at eight. He studied computer science, did an internship in 3D modelling and animation, and received a job offer from an animation company. He chose technology instead and started as a web designer at EDS, a large American IT services company. Within a year he had moved into Java development, and he stayed at EDS for twelve years as a Java developer and architect.
The entrepreneur showed up in the evenings. Bruno freelanced after hours, often until midnight and at weekends. Through a Hasselt media agency, a client needed a digital asset management system, a library for rich media. The systems on the market were expensive and complex. His reaction: "hey, I'm a programmer, how hard can it be to build this myself". Two months later the Virtual Press Lounge was live, a content portal that Belgian and Dutch media houses used for many years to produce their printed programme guides.
Automating a problem, then meeting a better product
After HP acquired EDS, Bruno joined Xplore Group, part of the Cronos group, as enterprise architect for a growing e-commerce company in Hasselt. He spent six years there. The platform in use then needed about three weeks of error-prone server setup before development could start on a new project. Bruno automated it: fifteen minutes of configuration, then scripts that did the job in two hours.
Then the team came across Demandware, a scalable software-as-a-service commerce platform where no one had to set up servers at all. It made the automation obsolete. The team switched focus and booked a Demandware training course. During a break, the trainer read an email aloud: Salesforce had just acquired them. Demandware later became Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Agentforce Commerce).
Planet of Commerce, founded inside the Cronos group
Bruno and Kevin Box had worked together on several projects. Kevin had a business and marketing background, Bruno was the techie, and both thought like entrepreneurs. Within Cronos, you bring an idea and a business plan, convince the founders to co-invest and get the chance to prove yourself. The group takes care of offices, payroll and IT, so a new company can focus on customers from day one.
Planet of Commerce onboarded JBC, Brantano and Torfs as its first customers, and more retailers in Belgium and the Netherlands followed. The founders ended many weeks with what they called Friday evening parking lot meetings, looking back at what had just happened.
