Peter Coffee

Peter Coffee joined salesforce.com in January 2007, after spending 18 years as an analyst and columnist for the company’s technology magazine eWEEK (including time under his former title PC Week). Based in the Los Angeles area, it currently works with corporate and commercial application developers to build a community based on Force.com: salesforce.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Pedro has 26 years of experience guiding the adoption and management of innovative information technologies and practices as an internationally published developer, consultant, educator, and author. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, NBC, PBS, Fox, Red de la India 18 and in Mexico Grupo Fórmula newscasts addressing a wide range of e-commerce topics. He chaired the four-day Web Security Summit Conference in Boston during the summer of 2000; He has been a keynote speaker, moderator or workshop leader at technical conferences, business and academic events in the U.S. and in India, Singapore, Australia, China, Korea, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Peter was previously the first PC planning manager at The Aerospace Corporation, where he also worked in the systems project management space and in active space applications of artificial intelligence techniques. Prior to that, he was a senior engineer working on Arctic project planning, construction management of chemical facilities, and engineered alternative fuels for various divisions of Exxon Corporation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, where he also served as a faculty member for the core curriculum in IT management; he has held other teaching positions in computer science (artificial intelligence) at UCLA and in business analytics at Chapman University. He is the author of two books, How to Program in Java and Peter Coffee Teaches PCs.

In his own time, Peter serves as a backpack expedition leader and Boy Scout merit badge counselor, a youth soccer referee, a volunteer science educator, and a community food bank coordinator; he also serves on the governing board of the Beach Cities Symphony Orchestra, a non-profit organization in the Los Angeles area that holds four free classical music concerts each year and education scholarship funds for young musicians.