Michael Coté, one of the analysts at RedMonk talked with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya about platform-as-a-service on the cloud.

He writes:

Back in February, LongJump started providing their platform to ISVs packaged to be used as a private PaaS, where “private” means “run on your own,” just as “private cloud” does. That is, these ISVs would use the LongJump platform to develop and then sell SaaS applications… Since February 2009, they’ve had 5 ISVs sign up, each creating of delivering SaaSes with LongJump in very narrow industries like electronic equipment maintenance, HR, and drug trial management.

Michael and Pankaj also discussed the current trend for PaaS providers towards delivering what developers need vs. what the industry is providing.

One of the more interesting statements from Pankaj was that development shops were finding the lack of traditional (to use my modifier) ALM (application lifecycle management) in PaaS development annoying. Folks like Force.com – and the wider “cloud” world” – the conceit goes, don’t provide enough hooks to fit into the software development process that people are used to. The thinking is that there’s a cultural mis-mapping between how people want to develop software for the cloud and how the cloud wants (if only by omission of other options) people to develop software. Bringing up the specter of ALM-weakness is a good ploy and segmenter: if you know what ALM means, you probably like it, and if you don’t know what ALM means, you’re probably not worth selling to.

To read the complete article, click here.

Technorati Tags: alm, application lifecycle, cloud computing, developers, isv, PaaS, saas

James Maguire over at Datamation listed his seven top cloud computing acquisition targets: companies that are “desirable choices” for the “giants” of the industry. Among his targets, Maguire includes IaaS provider GoGrid, cloud enabler Enomaly, storage service provider Vaultscape, cloud manager RightScale, virtualization appliance provider AppZero, application manager Elastra, and our very own application platform LongJump.

It’s an interesting “fantasy league” piece and we find it more flattering than serious about being a target. After all, it is nice to be desired or at least desirable.

And he offers on one of the more concise descriptions of LongJump we’ve seen in awhile:

Among other uses, Longjump is leveraged by developers who want to bring to market an extensive multi-tenant application, without building their own platform. (Think, for instance, of the way that Salesforce’s Force.com offers a development platform.) So ISVs and other service providers can use Longjump to sell SaaS offerings.

In other words, Longjump is a Platform-as-a-Server (PaaS) provider. Or, more accurately – warning, here comes deep jargon – it’s an APaaS, an application-platform-as-a-service play. This is because the Longjump solution offers a virtualized application development platform.

While there is nothing wrong with a bigger company using over the right technology to make a mass push, there isn’t that much acquisition activity lately in the cloud space that we’ve seen. Part of the reason may be that many of the larger players are looking at the entire cloud market, and will likely play in the traditional parts of cloud computing first. The first acquisitions will likely be in the infrastructure based virtualization and management solutions or point solutions that fill a gap, then the platforms. But because a platform like LongJump has such broad appeal with ISVs and enterprises alike, we have just as strong a chance at making an impact through partnerships and deals as we would through being acquired.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, datamation, isv, james maguire, multitenancy, PaaS, saas, software-as-a-service

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya was in San Francisco last week for a video shoot. We won’t go into details about what we were shooting, but we do think the video will go a long way to articulating our vision and value proposition for the LongJump platform.

We feel like our product is starting to take off. Besides being named a Cool Vendor from Gartner, many doors have opened in the recent months and it is clear that the LongJump platform’s ability to quickly enable companies to build their SaaS application business has a real, recognized value. There also seems to be a real trend for companies who have made a point to start building applications on the cloud, don’t want to go rebuild from scratch. Everyone we talk to lately seems to see that LongJump changes the development cycle with a multitenant application platform that enables faster application creating, less wheel reinvention, and greater control over applications deployed to your customers.

The video will be available some time in August. Look for it!

Technorati Tags: cloud, enterprise applications, pankaj malviya, saas, software-as-a-service

The recording from last week’s webinar on Developing and Deploying SaaS Applications featuring MySQL and SIMCO Electronics is now available. The webinar discussed many aspects of building a SaaS business including how to get to market faster without significantly adding a lot of investment and resources. It also discussed many aspects of readying SaaS applications in the public cloud as well as on-premise and private clouds.

The webinar covers the complete application lifecycle for a SaaS deployment including:

• Data Modeling and Application Development
• Test and Release Processes
• Deployment into Public and Private Clouds
• Publishing and Version Management
• Partner Enablement and Ecosystem Building
• Platform and Application Upgrades
• Establishing Application Portability
• Billing and Tenant Support

To view the webinar, go to http://longjump.com/mysql. If you are not a MySQL registered user, you will have to sign up to view the recording.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, multitenancy, mysql, saas, simco, software-as-a-service, sun mic, sun microsystems, webinar

Our latest LongJump release (version 6.2) has hit the cloud with something desperately needed in today’s business application space: Flexibility and Visibility. Flexibility in the way that information is displayed and visibility into a deeper set of information and analysis. Many of today’s cloud applications come out of the gate serving a basic set of functions in a basic way. Rarely can the interface adapt to suit the needs of a wide array of users, and few can match LongJump’s depth in terms of features, scalability, and adaptability.

Over the course of the next week, we’re going to take in-depth looks at some of the big features that have been added like Digital Signatures, New Form Layouts, Object Inheritance, RSS/Atom Feed Report Publishing, and Data Snapshots.

Until then, be sure to check out our feature tour and the press release.

Technorati Tags: atom feed, cloud applications, digital signature, form processing, rss feed, snapshot data

LongJump will be a featured exhibitor at the Sun JavaOne conference this week at Moscone Center in San Francisco. We’re located in the Cloud Zone at Booth 511. Be sure to stop by and say “Hello,” if you’re going to be there. We’ll be demoing some new upcoming business and developer functionality that we think really changes the game when it comes to web-based application platforms.

The Pavilion hours are:

• Monday – 3PM to 7PM (with a Reception from 6 to 7PM)
• Tuesday – 11:30AM to 7:30PM (with a Reception from 6 to 7PM)
• Wednesday – 10AM to 4:30PM
• Thursday – 10AM to 2PM

We also have 2 free full conference passes (worth $2000 each) that we will give away to the first two people who sign up for a free trial account. Just go to our registration page and for “How did you hear about us” type in “JavaOne Blog Post.” Sorry! Only the first two responders can get the passes.

If you are late to the game, you can always sign up for the Pavilion Only pass at the JavaOne Registration page.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, developers, java, javaone, sun

Yesterday featured a nice article from Chad Berndtson of Computer Reseller News on their ChannelWeb blog about LongJump’s BAP. Chad spoke with company Chairman Rick McEachern about the impedous for the platform and the growing need for software producers to want to privately build, brand, deliver and control SaaS applications.

“We thought midsize ISVs between $40 million and $200 million would be the sweet spot,” (McEachern) said. “But we find ISVs whose companies are well over $1 billion coming to us, too. It’s very interesting that it spans the very small to the very large. What they’re saying to us is: ‘Basically, what you’re telling me is you’ve got Salesforce in a box and we can private label it?’ Well, that’s not really our message, but essentially, yes, it’s that. It’s OK with us if you want to put it in those terms.”

The complete article is available on the ChannelWeb site.

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, isv, on-premise, saas, software-as-a-service

LongJump today announced that The David Allen Company, renowned experts in personal and organizational productivity, including David Allen’s decade-long bestseller Getting Things Done and the more recent Making It All Work books as well as many public and private coaching session and seminars, has selected LongJump’s Business Applications Platform to manage its business development and resource management operations for the company.

Before we made our selection, we evaluated several vendors, including some well-known competitors to LongJump.  We felt that not only did LongJump go the extra mile to understand our unique business needs, but they also provided the most flexible application platform to address the complex business needs of an entrepreneurial company with global mindshare.  The functionality of their offering helped us realize the vision of how to optimize our business processes over time. We’re looking forward to a long and successful relationship with LongJump.
- Robert Peake, CIO of The David Allen Company

You can read the complete press release here.

Technorati Tags: custom applications, david allen, getting things done, gtd, PaaS, situational applications

As many of you know, LongJump.com uses MySQL Enterprise Edition as our backend database. Like many, we chose it for its scalability, refined support and performance-for-value business case.

Sun Microsystem’s MySQL has invited us to present a case study for rapidly building SaaS applications. Enterprises and ISVs acknowledge the trend toward SaaS and many are looking for cost effective ways to SaaS-enable their applications, their processes and their business models to enable greater efficiency and collaboration. However, the best path to developing SaaS applications still remains uncharted.

This webinar will feature Brian Gerhold, Director of Engineering at Simco Electronics and Pankaj Malviya, Founder/CEO of LongJump. In this presentation we’ll examine how Simco’s development team built a next-generation SaaS application which automated data collection, reporting and compliance leveraging MySQL and the LongJump development platform.

Brain will discuss how Simco approached common SaaS application development problems and the solutions that lead to their success.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can accelerate the development and deployment of MySQL-backed multi-tenant SaaS applications, in your data center, hosted environments or in the cloud, this webinar is for you.

• Thursday, June 11, 2009: 13:00 (1PM) Pacific time
• The presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A

To take part in this webinar, sign up here.

Technorati Tags: developers, isv, mysql, saas, simco, sun microsystems

If you happen to be in Vegas in the coming weeks, you may want to stop by Mandalay Bay where our very own CEO Pankaj Malviya is taking part in a discussion panel at Interop Las Vegas on May 19th @ 2:45PM. The session is being hosted by Jeffery Kaplan, Founder and Managing Director at THINKstrategies. Jeffery has also covered LongJump before in a recent article. According to organizers, the panel shall discuss:

Hosted applications vary from the specific to the adaptable. At one end of the spectrum are websites with one purpose; at the other, open platforms that let you build your own applications. Navigating the landscape of on-demand applications can be a challenge — should you choose one comprehensive application suite, or best-of-breed portals? Do you need off-the-shelf functionality, or limitless flexibility? This session presents a taxonomy of on-demand applications so you can choose what works for your business.

Also participating in the discussion are:

Technorati Tags: interop, jeffrey kaplan, on-demand, PaaS, saas

Gartner analysts Yefim V. Natis and Robert P. Desisto produced the first comprehensive research note on LongJump’s Business Applications Platform with some key insight for those looking to take advantage of online and on-premises based PaaS. They take an honest look at the opportunities and challenges we face with our platform, but are buoyed by our current success so far.

LongJump is starting this expansion on a promising note — even at this early stage, it is already referencing two ISV customers poised to go to production with their applications, built on LongJump BAP.

Yefim and Robert also did an excellent job summarizing how to choose the right platform for the goals of your business:

The company took this direction in response to requests from prospects, and, in doing so, responded to the reality of the multiple patterns and reasons why organizations choose cloud-style application platforms:

• Many small and midsize user organizations and small ISVs are attracted to productivity and low cost of the cloud platform development (these prospects are served by the LongJump On-Demand service offering).
• Many large user organizations are attracted to the productivity of the cloud application platform environment, but insist that their data must remain on-premises (these prospects will be best-served by the single-tenant version of the new LongJump BAP).
• Many large ISVs wish to offer business applications as a service, but demand full in-house control and ownership of the underlying application platform (these prospects will be best-served by the multitenant version of the LongJump BAP).
• Some large user organizations are looking to build private cloud services in-house (these prospects also will be best-served by the multitenant version of the LongJump BAP).

Ultimately, while we know we have a golden product on our hand and that there is a real market need, our own execution will determine our level of success. So far, however, the signs are positive.

Gartner subscribers can log in and read the complete report here.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, gartner, multitenancy, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Gartner has named LongJump one of it’s Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure for 2009. Below is an excerpt of the report available to Gartner research subscribers:

Why Cool: LongJump is a cloud application infrastructure service provider delivering an application-platform-as-a-service (APaaS) offering. The company also has a history as a CRM vendor and offers a solution called “Relationals” (also the name of the parent company) that is delivered as a cloud application service.

Its Business Application Platform, branded as LongJump, is similar in concept and origin to Force.com’s underlying salesforce.com CRM application. LongJump is a APaaS cloud platform provider that stands out. It offers a runtime environment and a multitenant development environment, and it supports the creation of multitenant applications. It also offers multitenancy configuration options that allow the user to store data in a common multitenant database, one tenant database instance that is dedicated to the user or in a mixed multitenancy model. The service offers a visual development environment and uses Java as its programming language. LongJump also offers a range of delivery options. In addition to the cloud computing service, the company supports hosting of its environment on third-party infrastructure (for example, Terremark Worldwide data center, Amazon EC2/Amazon Simple Storage Service [Amazon S3] or installation as software in an enterprise data center).

Who Should Care: IT managers who are looking for flexible on-premises and off-premises deployment options using a business-oriented platform will find LongJump’s approach useful.

You can read the complete press release here.

Technorati Tags: app, cloud computing, cool vendor, gartner, multitenancy, PaaS

SaaS Vendor Converts Offering to Packaged Software
“After finding that numerous enterprises are not comfortable running applications outside their firewalls, one longtime SaaS vendor is converting to an on-premise model. “

Jeffrey Kaplan at Seeking Alpha writes…

Proliferation of SaaS and Cloud Platform Players Continues
“This new ‘portability’ is in response to the growing demands among enterprises to house their SaaS apps behind the firewall. It is also another example of the rapid technological advancements in the SaaS/cloud computing industry which increasingly permits this new form of ‘hybrid’ solution to occur.”

Technorati Tags: cio, on-premise, saas, software-as-a-service

Led by John Rymer, Forrester’s research team including Randy Heffner, Jeffrey S. Hammond, James Staten, and Wallis Yu, provided an extensive report entitled “Platform-As-A-Service Is Here: How To Sift Through The Options” on several PaaS vendors, including LongJump. The report discusses the rewards and risks of PaaS for application development and includes products up and down the PaaS stack, and is one of the most extensive reports on the topic.

The basic reward of PaaS is that it allows IT groups to defray capital costs and some operations costs (configuration, management, reliability, and scalability) to a vendor. PaaS shares these potential advantages with other forms of “cloud computing.” If the economics work out, application development groups should be able to use these cost savings to improve their responsiveness to the business’ needs for new and changed applications.

The Forrester report also deep dives into how enterprises can start planning for PaaS-based initiatives with a pragmatic approach to their long tail IT applications, including on-premise deployment as offered by LongJump’s new platform configuration.

Forrester recommended that application development managers begin to experiment with PaaS to determine its potential future value. Forrester is convinced that today’s PaaS market contains at least the seeds of the next generation of application platforms, if not one or more of the companies that will drive the category. We recommended considering how PaaS can help deal with current business needs and listed important factors to consider when working to create a prudent initial approach to PaaS.

The complete report is available on Forrester’s website here. If you subscribe to their research, you can get the report for free.

Technorati Tags: application development, Application Strategy & Selection, Architecture & Technology Strategy, Computer Architectures, Data Management, Development Tools, forrester, Information & Knowledge Management, IT department, IT Infrastructure & Operations, IT Services, john rymer, Outsourcing, PaaS, Packaged Applications

From ComputerWorld’s Mark Everett Hall (which includes an interview with LongJump customer NES’s CTO Izak Joubert)…

Get cloud tools, but forget the cloud
“(Joubert) wanted an application platform that let him quickly create new services without having to update complex database schemas. Joubert evaluated Force.com, App Engine and other cloud services, but settled on LongJump… According to Joubert, LongJump cuts out all of the “building block” work in app dev for his team. As a result, his current development project, which would have taken 18 months using .NET, will be wrapped up after three and half months.”

From CNet’s Charles Cooper…

LongJump to foster private clouds for corporate IT
“Private clouds… typically offer stronger security and reliability and are thought to have special appeal to IT managers keen on keeping their use restricted to company employees. LongJump, which sells an on demand enterprise applications platform, is licensing technology that will let IT managers build apps on a cloud platform as a service and keep local control of their data.”

From ZDNet’s Phil Wainwright…

LongJump puts PaaS on-premise
“In a move that will horrify purists but bring a smile to the face of many conventional ISVs desperate to launch SaaS offerings of their own, platform-as-a-service provider LongJump is today making its platform available as customer-installable licensed software… In my view, LongJump’s hybrid offering plugs a gaping hole in the market today, both for ISVs and for enterprises. No conventional software vendor offers a fully equivalent hosted PaaS alternative to its on-premise platform.”

From InfoWorld’s Tom Sullivan…

LongJump Puts SaaS Inside IT Shops
“By installing the software in-house, IT shops can take control of otherwise hosted functions, such as multi-tenancy, application delivery, and portability… Likewise, ISVs and SaaS providers can use LongJump’s Business Applications Platform to add more features and capabilities to existing services.”

From Paul Miller of The Cloud of Data…

LongJump embraces private Clouds with new licensing model for Business Application Platform
“Business users are able to take a degree of control over their own application needs, whilst reassuring the CIO and IT Team that everything is running on top of a single set of secure infrastructure over which they have control.”

From Markus Klems of Cloudy Times…

Control the Cloud: Licensing LongJump
Enterprise and ISVs now have control and have a choice to take a proven application platform and install it internally, within their corporate firewall or private cloud, without worrying about compliance, security, or confidentially issues.

Technorati Tags: charles cooper, cloud computing, cnet, computerworld, infoworld, mark everett hall, paul miller, phil wainwright, saas, software-as-a-service, tom sullivan, zdnet

LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product for on-demand application creation, has been selected as a finalist by the editors at Webware.com, a CNET site, for the 2009 Webware 100 Awards in the category of Infrastructure and Storage. In each of the Webware 100 categories, there are 30 finalists, and from that list will include 10 winners selected by the general public.

Voting ends April 30th. All the winners will be announced on May 19.

To vote, click here.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, cnet, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, rafe needleman, webware

Sunnyvale, CA, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 – LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today unveiled that its LongJump Business Applications Platform can be licensed for use within an enterprise’s data center or licensed by independent software vendors to build and host their own high performance, scalable, multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

The LongJump Business Application Platform will appeal to two market segments seeking more control and faster time to market benefits. The first will be enterprises that want the capabilities of a PaaS for custom application development but require more control of the data, such as those dealing with government and civil agencies, financial and compliance processes, and health and patient related information. The other is Independent Software Vendors and Service Providers that want to launch new, branded SaaS offerings but realize that developing a comprehensive, multi-tenant platform can be cost prohibitive and limits how quickly they can get to market and generate revenues.

The Emergence of the Private Cloud

Corporate IT has long sought a quick way to visually assemble information management applications for their divisional users. One catalyst is the acute recession that has forced many companies to slash budgets and require IT to cut costs and increase efficiencies within their departments and data centers. LongJump’s Business Application Platform approach improves corporate IT productivity by helping them build a “private cloud” that provides a common foundation for building custom applications which run securely behind their own firewall. LongJump also provides a unified interface, integrates with business data and systems, creates dynamic transactional applications, and easily handles the complex relational information architectures.

According to David Cearley, VP and Gartner fellow in Gartner’s Web and Cloud Computing service, “Just as in the early days of the Internet, the cloud definition is best-suited to include a public cloud (external, like the Internet) and private clouds (internal, like intranets). Private clouds will be used by companies that do not want to have their IT-related services available to external customers but that do want to leverage the delivery and acquisition model the cloud enables.”

With its new offering, LongJump delivers the most flexible alternative for corporate IT looking to leverage all the benefits of rapidly building applications in cloud platform as a service, but within their own premises. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance, information security and compliance are paramount and keeping local control of their information is an absolute necessity.

“Our business is about using our financial expertise to deliver a great customer experience,” says Dan Yoder, Chief Operating Officer at NES Financial. “Technology is an important part of our business model; it’s an enabler for service delivery. However, because of the nature of the transactions we handle, it’s important that NES Financial have control of the platform and information. It makes sense for us to implement a comprehensive applications platform approach for bringing new financial services to market by leveraging the best technology platform we could find that would help us do that. We found LongJump to be that solution.”

A Multi-tenancy Platform for ISVs and Service Providers

Even companies that offer hosted applications today realize that the ever increasing requirements to add more features and platform capabilities stretches their organization by increasing costs, demands for specialized IT developers, and risk as complexity rises. ISVs and Service Providers know that SaaS offerings represent a great revenue growth opportunity for them but they need to accelerate their time to market with their solution, preserve their branding and user experience uniqueness and differentiation, and reduce costs of delivery so they can maximize profitably.

To many ISVs, assigning their customer to a third-party PaaS provider presents too much risk, especially when they become subject to the PaaS providers’ delivery services. ISVs need to control the service delivery – where they host the platform, manage the service levels they deliver, and enforce their own operational policies for their customers. They also want to have more control over how they price their service offering – as high or as low as their business deems appropriate. They want to remain the customer’s main contact for the service offering – from end to end.

“Before we made our selection, we evaluated several CRM vendors, including some well-known competitors to LongJump. We felt that not only did LongJump go the extra mile to understand our unique business needs, but they also provided the most flexible application framework platform to address the complex business needs of an entrepreneurial company with global mindshare,” stated Robert Peake, Chief Information Officer, of The David Allen Company. “The functionality of their offering helped us realize the vision of how to optimize our business processes over time. We’re looking forward to a long and successful relationship with LongJump.”

LongJump’s Proven Platform Removes Hurdles and Delivers Full Control

Enterprise and ISVs now have control and have a choice to take a proven application platform and install it internally, within their corporate firewall or private cloud, without worrying about compliance, security, or confidentially issues.

• Control of Delivery Options: The LongJump Business Applications Platform gives businesses multiple deployment options to choose from in deciding how and where they want their platform to run. So whether Hosted, On-Premise, or run by LongJump’s professional Managed Services, businesses ¾not the platform vendor¾ now have full control of their customers, data, and applications, while avoiding vendor-driven policies, updates, changes and lock-in. Companies have broad flexibility to decide how to deploy their licensed LongJump platform; they could opt to deploy a private, behind-the-firewall instance, or use a virtualized hosting provider like Amazon EC2. Companies can choose to outsource infrastructure or use existing internal infrastructure.
• Control of Multi-Tenancy: It’s critical to any SaaS offering that the underlying data model supports multi-tenancy. This is the architecture that virtually partitions each account to serve multiple customers from a single shared instance of an application while enabling every account can have its own personalized experience. LongJump’s patent-pending, multi-tenancy Business Application Platform provides businesses with several multi-tenancy configurations to meet their varying requirements, including: Multi-Tenant/Single Database, Multi-Tenant/Multiple Database, and Mixed-Tenancy, supporting both models simultaneously.
• Control of Application Portability: More than ever, businesses require flexibility and options because business conditions can change overnight. What made sense to host in the cloud at one time might need to be hosted in another environment in the future. With LongJump, the applications businesses create are portable; hey can be developed in the cloud and moved to another LongJump deployment in one’s datacenter or with another hosting provider. Businesses can benefit from multiple delivery options because the application structure, rules workflows, views, dashboards – everything that makes an application unique – can be packaged and moved.
• Control of Release Management: Even though PaaS is novel, the way companies develop software is not. For compliance, quality and control reasons, companies follow the industry standard develop, test and release methodology. The LongJump Business Application Platform enables companies to create development, staging and production instances, and assign different development roles to each instance. Software releases are packaged and released to each instance until it has been approved for production release. This removes a barrier to software development inside the enterprise and enables development teams to productively work the way they always have. Corporate IT can also have a certified catalog of applications that are available for internal users to subscribe and use. LongJump’s flexible deployment also enables businesses to selectively update their clients to new applications, rather than forcing all clients to move at once to new software.
• Control of Branding: Service Providers or ISVs that license LongJump can fully customize the user interface to maintain their branding and user experience. With full branding control Service Providers and ISVs know that from the moment a customer logs in to when they log off, they will see only their company’s branding creating.

“Until now, companies have not had a PaaS solution that gives them the full control over how and where they choose to run their applications, data and customer information. Our new Business Applications Platform was designed to address the requirements that our customers and prospects were asking for, and we’re very pleased that LongJump has stepped up to the plate to fill a void in the market,” noted Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump.

Pricing and Availability

The LongJump Business Application Platform is available now for Licensing by Enterprises, Software developers and Service Providers. Call 800.886.9028 for pricing details based on system configuration options.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, david allen, david cearley, gartner, isv, multitenancy, private cloud, saas

LongJump, along with companies like Akamai, AMD, AT&T, Cisco, CSC, EMC, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, Sun Microsystems and VMWare, proudly joins the Open Cloud Manifesto, the first step in defining vendor-neutral interoperability standards for cloud based platforms.

The manifesto defines cloud computing as:

• Scalability on Demand
• Streamlining the Data Center
• Improving Business Processes
• Minimizing Startup Costs

It also lists the challenges of adopting cloud computing in real-world business environments including:

• Security
• Data and Application Interoperability
• Data and Application Portability
• Governance and Management
• Metering and Monitoring

The goals of the manifesto is to promote:

• Choice
• Flexibility
• Speed and Agility
• Skills

And as cloud computing matures, there are several key principles that the manifesto hopes to address to ensure the cloud is open and delivers the choice, flexibility and agility organizations demand. We are eager to work with other cloud providers to ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards. The goal for vendors should be to not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms. We also recognize that all platforms must try to adopt existing standards wherever appropriate while also helping to define new standards that promote innovation.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, cloud manifesto, open cloud

The gang at CS Techcast, a podcast by Consortio Services, talked with the CEO of LongJump, Pankaj Malviya, about Platform as a Service to get the scoop on cloud computing trends for business. They discuss the adoption of cloud computing platforms within corporate IT teams, and how PaaS provide a point in evolution for developers to create enterprise applications in the cloud. Pankaj also discusses how LongJump is one of many platform tiers within cloud computing. The interview also examines how PaaS changes IT’s perspective to evaluate their focus in their organizations in regards to cost savings, security, and capabilities inherent in the platform they build on.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, IT department, PaaS

First, let’s talk “stuff.” If you mean by data, absolutely. As Facebook’s recent stumble has indicated, customers should be able to freely move their content. In fact, any application platform should have published APIs that are enable you to migrate data in and out of the system. And their code-based development should support industry standard syntax and logic like Java so at the very least, you can migrate custom logic and processing. But if you mean the applications themselves, which you could argue is the valued piece, that is going to take awhile.

Applications are a combination of data structures (or data models), processing, presentation, a range of interaction that works in concert with the existing platform. As such, every platform vendor has ways of adapting those structures to help businesses leverage as much of the pre-built platform as possible. For PaaS providers, the application modeling and framework are part of their magical sauce, often uniquely optimized for their operating environment, mixed with a large dose of customer requests, and added to that many late night hours of ingenuity. Why? Because there is no all-encompassing platform yet, but each step takes us closer.

Alan Zeichick of SD Times has a more sensible response to issues of standardizing the cloud.

Standards, hastily enacted, can stifle innovation. Cloud computing is in an early experimental growth stage. Sure, we have some well-entrenched early success stories, such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, but it would be a potential tragedy to allow the early work of three companies to be codified as standards. We need time for their cloud offerings to shake out for a few years. We need time for new players to enter the market with new technologies – and new ideas. We need time to broaden the base upon which the standards are made to go beyond commercial interests.

To add to Alan’s point, as we build our platform, our job is never done. Companies are finding more and more uses for LongJump and with each new use comes a handful of new requirements — sometimes involving a change to our modeling and framework. It’s exciting because it’s making our platform richer, more robust and more sophisticated with every update.

If you asked us today to adhere to a standard, we would say: “for what… and whose?” It’s not like millions of companies are jumping online creating applications and abandoning their traditional architectures. At this point a cloud standard would be like asking companies like us to band together to set rules and speed limits and street etiquette before we’ve reached escape velocity. Yes, it’s safe, but completely impractical.

When WiFi was in its early stages (or the Internet for that matter), standards came about when adoption became wider. Adobe held PDF until it ensured that everyone could read it. HTML is still changing as new browser technology is introduced. You want standards? Help improve adoption of these platforms and lobby for the changes that will make them interoperable. Don’t hang up projects based on interoperability first.

And if you’re worried about lock-in, pick an application platform vendor that is willing to work with you on those issues. Talk to them. Give them a chance to address those issues, one-on-one. It’s still early and you can help define the platform you need. And that is better than any standard.

Technorati Tags: application development, Applications, cloud computing, Platform-as-a-Service, standardization

Technorati Tags: application development, coghead, custom applications, enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform, Platform-as-a-Service, techcrunch

SaaS solutions have been around for going on 10 years now and the time is right to see broader and deeper adoption of this approach to application development and utilization. Lower risk processes like sales, marketing and HR have provided the first set of users to benefit from shorter implementation times, easier to use applications and functionality that is perpetually kept up to date. Now that enterprises are faced with doing even more with even less, SaaS should be considered as a replacement more mission-critical internal business processes as well as customer facing applications. By all means grieve, but know that SaaS has been waiting patiently for you since the day you first met. She’s grown as platform and so have your needs.

The traditional technology adoption cycle has just received a jarring inflection point kick in the pants. Typically new technologies move through a predictable path from early adopters to market laggards the same way almost every other commodity introduced into the marketplace. It is a challenging cycle that many technologies fail to overcome (does anyone remember bubble memory and hand-held scanners?) but fairly predictable none the less. According to Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm, each stage along the way requires certain strategies and tactics that increase the likelihood of success.

Assessing the Grieving Process

The last few months have dramatically changed the landscape globally and everyone will be looking at everything they do from a different perspective. We are just now getting out of the denial phase of dealing with this crisis and heading smack into anger over how this all happened and happened so quickly. If this path is continued, bargaining will ensue and that means evaluating what can be done differently to survive in the new economic reality. From an organizational perspective that means looking at every cost associated with everything to see if it can be done away with or done more cheaply in another way (saas starts looking better for a broader role in the business.)

Without this shock to the system the status quo would have been maintained because there would not have been a compelling reason to change what was already in place. Companies do not experience depression, the next phase of coping with a tragic event, even though the people that make up an organization can and often do experience it quite profoundly.

So that leaves acceptance of the fact that a bad thing has happened and the only choice is to adapt or die. Since death of an organization means serious economic disruption to all concerned, adapting to leaner and flexible processes is the only viable choice. These types of changes are always talked about in an organization but ultimately there is little motivation to go through painful change when everyone feels like the ship is generally going in the right direction.

While SaaS and cloud computing are not a panacea, it does offer organizations the ability to get in, get up and get running more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional software applications. While the TCO debate continues over whether saas is cheaper with larger user populations over a long period of time, there is one major component that is overlooked when calculating the benefits of saas. Continuous upgrading of a SaaS platform means a company never has to go through an upgrade or deal with the incompatibilities so-called suite product offerings.

The reality of SAP and Oracle’s products is they are a mixture of legacy code bases from the companies they purchased over the years. So adding a configurator to your CRM system means a whole new implementation with business disruption and resource drain to do the implementation. Further, if the configurator gets an upgrade there is no guarantee that it will work with your existing versions of opportunity management and demand planning. This is why so many companies are running customer support systems that are 2 years past the last upgrade and in numerous cases outside standard support from the vendor. It’s also why SOA has become a mantra in many IT circles.

The Time to Move On

Today everything must be reevaluated with more and more organizations looking at their legacy systems and transitioning them to the cloud. They will be able to do it more quickly with less money and maintain the applications with fewer people. In addition they will be able to react more quickly to changing market requirements and even globalize operations to take advantage of lower labor costs or access to new market opportunities. It is time to realize that building a SAS 70 II compliant data center is better left to those who do that sort of thing for a living. Likewise, it is time to acknowledge that the lower levels of the software stack have commoditized to a point where there should be little or no need for a staff of database architects and programmers, no matter where their located, hammering endlessly at an attempt to hone the perfect application to keep the business running. Situational, composite applications that adhere to enterprise conditions and dynamics and are turned around in days rather than months are the new new things.

2009 will be a watershed year for SaaS because the cost of maintaining the status quo is no longer sustainable in the face of seismic economic changes. The organizations that will survive, or even thrive, going forward are the ones whose systems don’t prevent them from making the necessary changes to their business model or operating practices. All the talk of building an agile enterprise will be put to the test this year and cloud offerings will be one of the key enabling technologies that will increase the likelihood of success.

There is life after traditional legacy applications in the enterprise and it’s time for both you and SaaS to go forward together into this new life.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crossing the chasm, database, geoffrey moore, IT department, IT projects, IT silos, legacy applications, saas, Sales and CRM, soa, software-as-a-service

There’s a new, vendor-neutral site called Power in the Cloud that is completely focused on situational applications: custom applications that are tailored to meet specific business needs. They have a particular interest in the different platforms, like LongJump, that are geared towards situational apps and are having some interesting discussions around some of the advantages and challenges of this emerging space.

The discussions tend to be around how the more advanced business user or analysts can take advantage of these platforms, but they also recognize tools for more hard core developers.

Here’s their coverage of LongJump.

Technorati Tags: enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, situational applications

Additionally, we have added some important features for tracking information, improving administrative update performance, and application design as well as a new help system.

More Interface Changes

As part of the user interface update, users will be able to choose their own color schemes within Setup and companies will be able to load their logo for display on the left of the home page. Additional interface updates include:

• moving action buttons to the top of a view
• moving the record counter to within the view management icon
• introduction of widget-based web tabs for putting dashboards anywhere in an application, not just the Home tab
• introduction of database joined view web tabs for displaying views built by joining objects
• the ability to hide empty fields in a form layout within a section
• record owner information can be moved to the top of a record detail or to the bottom within a layout

Field History Logging

LongJump now makes it possible to keep a change log for specific fields in a record for change management, auditing and compliance purposes. By enabling  audit logging on a field, changes to that value will be time stamped including who made the change, the previous and new value.

Applying Formulas to Report Summaries

You can now create custom summary formulas to build additional analysis by taking a total summed value computed by the report and applying a more complex formula to it. For example, a summary of total goods sold can be shown with an additional calculation to determine sales compensation.

Wildcard Searching

Users can now use wildcards like * and ? to help with searching. LongJump’s search algorithm will look for patterns based on the wildcards.

Public and Private Tagging

Records can now have two levels of tagging: public and private. A private tag is one created and used only by the user. Public tags are shared across the organization.

Static Resources

Application developers will be able to load and store web resources such as CSS stylesheets, images, Javascript files, ZIP and TAR files to be served when called from custom pages, code, or other areas of the application.

Mass Data Operations

For any of the administrative data operations such as mass update, delete, ownership change and emptying the recycle bin, processing for more than 2,500 records will be conducted as a background process so users can continue to work freely and be alerted via email when the operation is complete.

Exporting Attachments

Users will be able to export any documents or attachments associated with a record during the export process. Files will be encoded as either ISO-8859-1,
UTF-8, or UTF-16 format during export.

Other Changes

• fields now support default values
• the Photos tab has been removed and has been consolidated with the Documents tab

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, enterprise applications, Longjump, Platform

Among the topics they discussed were LongJump’s bootstrapped roots, the software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) industry, cloud computing as a whole impact on enterprises and businesses.

To listen to the complete interview, along with Steve’s interviews with Court Cunningham, the CEO of Yodle and Daren Tsui from MSPOT, click here.

Technorati Tags: bootstrapping, cloud computing, innovators radio, PaaS, pankaj malviya, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

Enter PaaS.

First, I’ll admit right now, I’m not a developer. I’ve written some applications before in a variety of languages including assembly, C++, Pascal, Java, and BASIC, but coding was not my calling. However… as a business user, there is some real advantage to the PaaS model, especially as it crashes into a sustained, cooperative relationship with agile developers.

Specifically two major points of the Agile Manifesto (”Customer Collaboration” and “Responding to Change”) are inherently easier in a PaaS environment. PaaS provides a significant amount of customization and configuration at the non-coding level, which can deepen a user’s commitment to the application.

For example, I can “self-service” myself to design some very sophisticated automated actions or generate elaborate reports, normally reserved for a DBA and programmer. Such as with LongJump’s data policies or workflow or validations, many automated processing functions are laid out in an easy-to-convey way. I just have to have an understanding of how to dissect the data.

And when I reach my limit of expertise on the design platform or when the platform’s native functionality reaches a wall, I can turn to my buddy, Joe the Agile Software Developer, and say, “Can you write me a connector to our backend such-and-such?” or “Do you have time to write me a simple cleansing algorithm to hunt down bad email addresses?”

The parameters are fairly well defined. The constructs of the platform are very clear. Best of all, changes can happen in near real-time. If Joe writes a Java function for one of our objects, it can go live immediately without having to reinstall a thing. Checked in code is usable the moment it leaves Eclipse. While web developers might say “so what” to that, for enterprise developers, it can be something prized.

And if Joe’s code is close enough to what I need for another object, and I can read enough of it to know where my differences are, I can copy and paste the code for use in another object. It becomes one less thing Joe needs to do for me (freeing him to play WoW or whatever it is programmers do with free time — probably read about coding).

The end result are applications that not only work the way the end user needs them to (point number 2 of the manifesto), they are essentially alive – adapting whenever I have a new business need. And the realization of those changes are not measured in weeks or months or even days – more like minutes.

As a business user, because I’m tailoring the app to my own needs, there’s also a real stickiness to it and more satisfaction as we grow old together. As I mature, as our processes mature, the app matures with me. It’s mine.

And isn’t that the point of agile development?

Technorati Tags: agile manifesto, agile software, application development, developers, programming

This is something we’re predicting will coalesce; right now it’s a bunch of individuals doing this on their own, but we expect lean software to catch on… Lean software could be the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications and could be helpful in a down economy.

Rymer describes lean software as:

An approach to building, delivering and running software that values fit-to-purpose, simplicity and time to results above all. Lean approaches minimize complexity, startup time and resource usage, and [avoid] features and methods not essential to fulfilling the application’s business purposes. Developers can easily combine Lean software components with others when large systems require more features.

Rymer is spot on in discussing the need for programmers to build leaner, smaller applications. One thing the Web 2.0 push has taught us was to be more introspective when it comes to our application needs. Do we really need every application to be a monolithic exercise in features and functionality? Probably not. Lean software is also very much akin to situational applications.

At the same time, the platform those applications are built on are extremely important. The platform itself must be rich enough to support agile development models where apps can be deployed at will and common business infrastructure components don’t have to be built up from scratch. It is also important for the platform to allow situational and lean applications to connect to each other natively so you don’t end up creating another application silo.

Rymer also stated seven principles to follow for developing lean software:

1. Use fit-to-purpose tools and platforms
2. Employ a lean and agile development process
3. Follow standards that enable pluggable components for tools and applications
4. Hire skillful developers
5. Leverage open source
6. Optimize deployments
7. Rent or outsource context and own core applications

As Rymer mentions, there are some solutions already in the form of OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service), which provide modular and elastic alternatives to heavy solutions.

Technorati Tags: application development, custom applications, developers, enterprise applications, eweek, forrester, john rymer, lean software, PaaS, situational applications

Unfortunately, the article seems to miss the point. Platforms like LongJump, while are easy enough for savvy business users to create applications, also improve the position of coders. Why?

1. Developers are going to have to code a lot less and will not have to revisit applications they create as much because the majority of the object and process modeling needs in the application are already provided as part of the platform framework.
2. That means less boring coding like writing yet another rule engine or yet another SOAP connector for some small special project. Instead, the evolving challenges of development can be tackled instead of being quagmired in reinventing the wheel.
3. PaaS also reduces the cost of application development for highly specialized applications, allowing companies to do more with less resources while also optimizing internal processes and improving transparency of information.

Sophisticated applications, those with special needs or complex processes, will still require custom coding or customization of some kind that will require the discipline of a skilled developer who understands data, efficient processes, actions and design.

What PaaS does provide is an opening for a new kind of application development where business units, instead of running their operations on spreadsheets and emails, can quickly create collaborative applications, workflows, processes and reports for basic business tracking, management, and analysis.

One way to think about PaaS is that it is sort of like of Adobe Dreamweaver. The basic core function is to create a usable solution to a problem quickly and easily. If you need more sophistication, the coding engine is there for an HTML/Javascript expert, but in the meantime, a business user can go in, mock up what they need, make basic edits, or even have a serious contender solution and not have to code a single line. These would be applications that most companies would not have paid a developer for anyway.

So if you’re a coder, relax. We’re just getting rid of the junk work so you can spend your time on the cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: developers, infoworld, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

By now, everyone knows the value of software as a service (SaaS) to small and midsize companies. But eventually, PaaS could have an even more profound effect on growing companies’ access to the applications they need. Platform as a service is a technique that makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to develop and deploy custom SaaS applications using existing components.

With PaaS solutions, more vertical industries that have traditionally been excluded in custom software circles will likely find a fitted answer without paying a large amount for consulting. In addition, Paul states that “growing companies can expect PaaS to deliver not only more customized software at faster speeds, but also better prices.”

Technorati Tags: PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, smb

1. IT and Business Alignment
2. Build Business Skills in IT
3. IT Strategic Planning
4. Attracting IT Professionals
5. Making Better Use of Information
6. Manage Change
7. Reduce the Cost of Doing Business

Tied for number 8 were: Improve IT Quality, Retaining IT Professionals, and Security and Privacy.

This list offers a nice dovetail as to how LongJump can positively make an impact within IT organizations and their senior management.

IT and Business Alignment

By building applications on the LongJump platform, IT can have greater awareness of the information their constituents are dealing with under a centralized platform. And because of how adaptable LongJump is to business needs, IT can also provide greater responsiveness to new business challenges.

Build Business Skills in IT

Too often, IT teams are relegated to keeping the lights on. Using LongJump as the platform for their applications, IT can become a solution service center rather than just an infrastructure provider. In addition, they can develop greater understanding of the needs of their customers and make better decisions.

IT Strategic Planning

The most pressing IT strategy issue today is how IT can optimize their application data so that it serves those who need it. Rather than reinventing the wheel for every application, taking a more leveraged platform approach is key to maximizing developer resources as well as keeping the infrastructure lean.

Attracting IT Professionals

There’s not much LongJump can do to address this issue directly, but imagine being able to provide a greater range of services to the organization without more headcount or external consultant costs? Would that cost advantage be enough to hire more solution-oriented IT professionals?

Making Better Use of Information

It’s not only that IT needs to make better use of information, but business units themselves need greater access and flexibility of reporting to information. LongJump provides a greater self-service culture among business units to quickly analyze and process data as they need it using the reporting engine and data policies.

Manage Change

By keeping data in LongJump, IT can track when changes to data occurs and who made the change. For more sophisticated processes, the workflow engine can help organizations define the proper process in which changes occur and understand who made the change. 

Reduce the Cost of Doing Business

With a single application platform strategy, LongJump enables organizations to reduce the cost of applications as well as complexity. Rather than paying for multiple applications and licenses, LongJump offers simplified licensing that charges for the platform, not the application, so costs are reduces for every application you add.

Improve IT Quality

The only way to improve IT quality is to consistently measure and monitor performance. LongJump keeps a complete log of activities so management can consistently audit team activities and associate them with key metrics and results.

Retaining IT Professionals

Not unlike attracting IT professionals, the cost savings that come with LongJump could conceivably be used to sweeten the salaries of existing IT employees. Or at the very least, reward solution-oriented IT members with interesting work and projects, rather than canned implementations.

Security and Privacy

LongJump’s robust security features ensure that data is only seen by those who need it. In addition, because it is a true multitenant platform, data is securely segmented from other companies and can even provide permission segmentation across groups, roles, or individual users.

Technorati Tags: information management, it concerns, PaaS, simposium

So how hard could it be for those same service providers to deliver network-based apps, be they simple things such as e-mail and hosting or complex applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management? The answer is, it turns out, pretty hard. But that doesn’t mean that carriers have — or should — give up on delivering software applications via their networks. It just means they have to be smarter and savvier, even as the types of services and apps that can be delivered via the network cloud are rapidly proliferating — from relatively simple messaging and security services to full-blown virtualized computing environments that can be “rented” by the month or hour.

I couldn’t agree more with this. Service providers have a maturation process they will need to go through to become software distribution channels. Since they are primarily geared towards an SMB market, they will require ready-to-go solutions that have immediate, meaningful impact, yet be able to take the shape of the businesses they are trying to serve.

For LongJump, we’re certainly trying to lay some groundwork in this area. LongJump, has partnered with service providers in some instances, including Singapore Telecom and Jamcracker, to deliver a broad range of platform-based application services to businesses.

“Every ASP application needs to have the ability to be customized; there isn’t a single customer willing to take a completely canned product,” said Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, of his company’s platform play. “If a service provider were to try to build what we can provide for them, it would take years. That’s our story: They can operate a single platform and build very powerful apps that they can offer individually but also are designed to talk with one another.”

In the end, it makes perfect sense. Service providers are the keepers of the pipes. As their business becomes more commoditized, they need to differentiate their services and take on a more value-added reseller role.

Technorati Tags: asp, carriers, cloud computing, jamcracker, PaaS, saas, service providers, singtel

We have heard from dozens of IT organizations charged with building web-based business applications for their constituents that meeting all of their needs is simply not possible. This is why IT silos and rogue/situational applications occur. LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya discussed this in The Long Tail of IT.

Yet many CIOs have yet to wake up to new ways to provide greater services while also lowering costs. The answer is to get your head in the cloud.

According to Goldman Sachs in their July 2008 IT Sales Opportunity survey of 100 CIOs, less than 2% of them said cloud computing was a priority. In fact, it was ranked last in a series of initiatives. Instead, their approach is to cut rather than invest modestly in these flexible services.

In an increasingly competitive business environment and with the emergence of cloud computing and its off shoot, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, these CIOs seem to be missing a bigger picture.

That’s because PaaS offers businesses a very demonstrable ROI while also strengthening operations an organization. Both these factors should have CIOs taking a closer look at PaaS not only for its economic benefits, but as an opportunity to improve information management and processes across the enterprise.

PaaS can add significant value to enterprise IT by enabling CIOs to better serve the business, operate at a more strategic level with business divisions and rapidly deliver application solutions to business partners. PaaS also provides a modest-cost approach to cloud computing that doesn’t require infrastructure procurement, datacenter overhead, and minimizes risk.

LongJump believes that PaaS can provide an economy of scale savings to businesses’ application initiatives immediately and in the long run. At the same time, organizations can improve their maturity level, delivery a greater breadth of services, and have more control over their information.

For more information about the economics of PaaS and Cloud Computing, I invite you to read our whitepaper: “PaaS-onomics: A CIO’s Guide to using Platform-as-a-Service to Lower Costs of Application Initiatives While Improving the Business Value of IT.“

Technorati Tags: cio, cloud computing, economics, goldman sachs, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

Software vendors throw around the term “enterprise” quite a bit, and while LongJump is no different, for us, the term has a real meaning. For our applications (everything from our CRM solutions to our Employee Manager) and our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), LongJump truly supports the notion of an enterprise: a business or organization that features multiple departments.

This is critical to understanding the depth of our platform, including our built-in team and role permission management system that offers enterprise-grade security to our highly extensible application interface. Our business model was built with enterprises of all sizes in mind. From the 10- to 20-person startup to the 20,000 Fortune 500 company, we’ve tried to maintain a critical balance between functionality and affordability because in the end, both spectrums have a thirst for both. The small company is going to need powerful tools if it hopes to grow and a Fortune 500 company is going to mature, deep functionality at an economy-of-scale to support all their constituents.

Obviously SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and PaaS solutions provide that immediate time-to-value. You’re up and running on a complete platform and application space literally in seconds. Your team just logs in and is ready to start working. But certainly there are concerns, as indicated by J. David Lashar in The Hidden Cost of SaaS. Lashar states:

The relatively limited scope for configuring or customizing a SaaS initiative makes for low-cost, fast-paced implementation. However, this limited scope and implementation may not support the requirements, may not include the automations, and may not generate the intelligence (i.e., reports and dashboards) that are critical to the business. In other words, SaaS may actually impede the ability to realize full entitlement to CRM value. The cost is not a direct cost, but rather an opportunity cost in terms of lost CRM benefits, at least for enterprise-scale organizations that can afford on-premise solutions and might therefore be able to achieve greater CRM benefits from the greater functionality available from those solutions.

Certainly it is true that many SaaS CRM providers (and even on-premise CRM providers) have a limited scope in their ability to draw from enterprise sources and connect to the entirety of operations within a business. One reason is that those tools are often left to only certain members of the team. Others have to fend for themselves because of the cost of adding them as users. That’s why a platform strategy is critical, because platforms are extensible and designed to connect multiple applications and multiple departments. The economy of scale allows for a greater reach across the entire enterprise.

For example, LongJump’s SOAP Web Services API provides a direct connection point to a variety of web systems and is key to understanding how even on-demand applications contribute to the enterprise. Many SOA initiatives are locked into exchanging information across certain systems. Rarely do end-users see the benefit to help streamline their processes or analysis.

At LongJump we really believe that if you’re going to implement a PaaS solution, and you expect it to be wide-ranging enough within your multi-departmental enterprise, it needs to be truly affordable today as well as tomorrow.

This means supporting a complete enterprise view for everyone in the organization, not just a priviledged few.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, enterprise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, soa, software-as-a-service

ORLANDO, FL, GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo CONFERENCE, Monday, October 13, 2008 – LongJump, a leading Application Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, unveiled a new release of its platform with features and functionality aimed specifically to meet requirements of corporate enterprises. LongJump already enables corporate IT to fully implement the LongJump platform, with its built-in application creation, workflow and customization, and data analysis capabilities ? all without the added infrastructure costs or data center overhead. In addition, LongJump’s new release provides sophisticated, actionable trending analysis, email-based workflow interaction, sandboxing for improved management of the testing and deployment process, and mobile access to applications. LongJump will be located at booth #510.

“Until now, Global 2000 organizations have struggled with delivering and maintaining dozens of applications and data silos,” noted Pankaj Malviya, LongJump’s founder and CEO. “The core value of PaaS is to enable companies to create multiple, interconnected applications to serve all of their operational teams on a common, integrated platform. We’re pleased to deliver LongJump’s latest platform release that squarely supports key requirements of our corporate enterprise customers.”

PaaS = SaaS-based Application Development

Resource-taxed enterprises are increasingly moving to take advantage of the ease and flexibility that PaaS and SaaS solutions offer; however, IT still has concerns, and one of the most pressing is around the robustness of these platforms.

A September 2008 Gartner report titled, “Control Personnel Costs to Reduce Your Application Support Budget,” notes the following: “IT Key Metrics Data shows that approximately 38% of the IT budget is directly attributable to applications that support the business operations, including financial management and ERP, corporate performance management (CPM), SCM and CRM applications.”

Enterprise IT requires ways to reduce costs, development time, quality testing, delivering and maintaining application infrastructure, as well as increasing reusability of application components to streamline delivery and support. With Platform-as-a-Service, enterprise IT can build more applications on the same platform, and the economies of scale will take effect to dramatically lowering the costs of all subsequent application initiatives.

Since its inception, LongJump has delivered its enterprise-grade applications platform with a focus on eliminating obstacles that keep established companies from adopting PaaS on a wide-scale basis, such as proprietary scripting, proprietary languages, availability, and reintroducing new information silos.

With its ability to scale quickly, leverage existing data natively across different applications, and extend its platform with industry standard, Java-based tools, LongJump’s platform already addressed many of these enterprise concerns. This new release introduces an additional layer of functionality that enterprises rely on, including greater interoperability, enhancing security, and extending reporting to support audit and compliance requirements.

Key enhancements to LongJump’s new platform include:

• Business Process Automation:
  • Email-based Workflow Approvals: Lets users trigger workflow activities using any email device
• SOA Integration:
  • Compliance of common SOAP-encoding standards such as WSDL / WS-I: Integrates seamlessly
    with other systems or SOAs
• Application Release Process and Compliance:
  • Sandboxing: Enables a company to create a separate instance of LongJump in order to test applications before deploying them into a production environment. This gives enterprises consistent control to test applications in advance of rolling out updates in a more manageable and secure way to support regulatory and business process requirements.
• Mobile Access:
  • Mobile Access: Provides WAP-based wireless access for BlackBerry, iPhone and other webenabled mobile phones and devices
• Security Enhancements:
  • LDAP server integration and authentication: Enables integration into Single Sign-On enterprise environments
  • Additional Security Login Controls: Ensures login identity based on computer MAC addresses and personal security questions
  • Visibility Controls: Supports an added layer of control for certain data fields for securing specific information
• Enhanced Reporting:
  • Historical Data Tracking: Tracks history of data in specific fields for trending and analysis
  • Additional Reporting: Provides improved user reporting and auditing to support compliance
    requirement

The company’s announcement comes on the heels of its LongJump Development Suite announcement for developers eager to exploit SaaS-based application development and delivery.

About LongJump

Based in Sunnyvale, California, LongJump is a service of Relationals Inc., a privately-held, proven provider of on-demand CRM and SFA business applications to more than 150 enterprise companies. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog of highly customizable, business applications help companies reduces the time and cost of developing and delivering data-driven applications. Its business building blocks let developers and corporate IT teams gain significant time-to-value, since they can bypass the need to repeatedly recreate common business processes and functions. LongJump is the first platform-as-a-service provider to bring robust customization, integration, and powerful functionality to businesses of all sizes, enabling them to quickly design, implement and do further customization in an easy, affordable way. For more information, visit www.longjump.com or call 800.886.9028.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, gartner, itxpo, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya wrote an article on the “Seven Key Requirements Corporate IT Needs from PaaS” for TechCrunchIT and it was featured today.

In it, Pankaj discusses how cloud computing initiatives are gaining momentum with businesses of all sizes, particularly with enterprises that are looking to adopt the right solutions to address their ongoing business and IT challenges. He also discussed the broad range of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise business and IT units are examining more thoroughly as a direct evolution of SaaS-based, single-discipline solutions that are targeted toward the horizontal enterprise.

These seven requirements for PaaS are what we have been hearing from LongJump customers when they are evaluating the right solution. Specifically, enterprise IT departments that PaaS will surely impact.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, enterprise, PaaS, pankaj malviya, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service, techcrunch

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya was a featured guest on the PricewaterhouseCoopers Start Up Show hosted by Steve Bengston September 25th. Pankaj and Steve discussed how Platform-as-a-Service as an organizational application development platform and the future of cloud computing can help businesses improve their IT services.

He talked about the need for PaaS, benefits, state of the industry and market, implementation, what applications work best in the PaaS model, and the future worldwide adoption of PaaS.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

Martin Heller of Infoworld comments in “Cloud application builder adds development suite” :

“From what I saw in the demo, however, any Java/JSP developer should be able to become productive with LongJump fairly quickly, and the pre-built relational objects provided should make quick work of many common applications.”

 Sarah Perez of Readwriteweb.com writes in “LongJump Extends Itself With New Developer Suite” :

With the new LongJump Development Suite, an I.T. department can build the app they need, then use the included visual browser-based UI for data and process modeling. Alternately, they could instead choose to hand of the integration of the app with another system or application to a developer (or team of developers). Finding a developer to work with LongJump shouldn’t be an issue since the suite provided is a Java-based development environment complete with a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), something that’s used by 69% of Java developers today.

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy.com remarks in “LongJump Further Enhances Its PaaS Offerings to Developers” :

“…the fact that all the development and deployment are conducted online on LongJump platform means significant cost reduction for a business that can not afford the traditional infrastructure to run a business application on its own (while it is possible to ensure hosting of the applications elsewhere as well).”

Bob Thompson from CustomerThink Corp. remarks in “Jumping Into Cloud Computing Platform War: LongJump” :

“From a demo I saw, it seems developers can easily create custom applications, using a combination of data objects, workflow, business rules, etc. And custom Java code if you need it. I can envision developers creating fairly complex applications in a few days, and deploying immediately via the cloud.

From a technology standpoint, I’d say LongJump is on a par with Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. Both are powerful and built to support enterprise-grade applications.”

He goes on to say…

“LongJump strikes me as one of the real gems in the cloud computing market. Assuming it can execute its marketing strategy well, I think it will attract developers who like the robust platform, easy-to-use interface and standard Java code for customizations.”

Finally, Mark Hendrickson from Techcrunch observes in “LongJump Challenges Force.com with New Developer Suite” :

“LongJump will provide a sandbox area for developers to test their Java applications before deploying them into production. The platform also implements a reusable relational data object model that’s intended to save you time recoding when developing several applications.”

We’d love to hear from you if you have additional feedback on our Developer Suite.
 

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud computing, java, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Sunnyvale, CA, Monday, September 22, 2008 – LongJump, a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, today unveiled its LongJump Development Suite for developers eager to exploit the business opportunities and advantages of Internet-based application development and delivery. LongJump’s developer suite reflects the growing interest in cloud computing, which Gartner named one of the top ten strategic technologies for 2008, noting that web platforms are emerging to provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through cloud computing environments. Merrill Lynch predicts that within the next five years, the annual global market for cloud computing will swell to $95 billion.

While LongJump has already enabled businesses to harness a feature-rich platform to rapidly prototype and run multiple new applications without coding, this new offering provides advanced capabilities for developers with a Java-based set of tools to develop applications at the code level, allowing almost limitless enhancements and extensibility — all within a PaaS environment.

“Platform-as-a-Service is not only real; it is inevitable. For LongJump, capturing the hearts of developers and businesses alike means incorporating industry standard tools, building a full-featured enterprise-level platform, and reducing the time it takes to complete application projects,” stated Pankaj Malviya, LongJump’s founder and CEO. “LongJump’s PaaS offering brings a unique approach to eliminating the costs, complexity and repetition inherent in developing and deploying business applications.”

Platform-as-a-Service Emerging as Cost-Effective Cloud Computing

Traditionally, businesses that needed flexible applications would need to buy, build, and maintain a complex architecture of servers, databases, application frameworks and solution design. The PaaS model provides developers and enterprise IT teams with a more cost-effective way to extend or build custom applications. With LongJump, businesses can benefit from significant “time-to-value” and ongoing adaptability since they can bypass the need to recreate common business data models, processes and functions. That, coupled with an on-demand, web-based platform, makes PaaS the ideal platform for a range of business critical applications and situational applications that often exceed the budgets and commitment businesses can provide.

Standards-Based Approach Shortens Time to Market

Unlike most PaaS providers offering platforms that rely on proprietary code and languages to build hosted applications in the cloud, LongJump has opted for a standards-based approach by leveraging a Java-based development environment complete with a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), used by 69% of Java developers, according to BZ Research. 

“Many have tried to distill the definition of PaaS to its most essential elements, but nearly everyone emphasizes flexibility and customizability relative to SaaS and ease of deployment relative to custom-built software. End-users prize SaaS applications for their universal accessibility, high degree of reliability and convenient pricing. These applications, however, are still packaged functions at their core and cannot always be fully customized for an enterprise’s internal purposes. PaaS products attempt to win on customizability by providing users with a hosted palette of components that can be assembled as needed into business applications.” noted enterprise software analyst Vishwanath Venugopalan, of The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst firm, in a recent report. “Relative to custom software built and deployed in-house, PaaS offerings attract user interest for ease of deployment and reduced time to market.”

LongJump’s PaaS offering enables the use of customizable, reusable application “Building Blocks” including objects, scripts, component extensions, business logic, data policies, and workflows that greatly improve the speed of application development and sharing of data across applications. Once data models and processes are created by either clicking or coding, these building blocks can be reused across the platform to serve a variety of business needs. For example, a single contract object and its records can be created and reused by business teams such as sales, business development, compliance, legal, and finance by simply modifying data policies and workflows.

The new LongJump Development Suite includes a visual browser-based UI for data and process modeling as well as advanced coding and scripting features for developers who are familiar with Java, so they can enhance and extend applications or completely create new data models and processes from scratch. Additionally, LongJump provides a set of web service integration points using SOAP and RESTful APIs to seamlessly connect to external systems or platforms. When LongJump Objects are extended, those fields are immediately available for integration with SOAP and REST APIs, workflow processes, and the built-in report creation wizard. 

Key features in LongJump’s Development Suite include:

Industry Standard Tools and Plug-Ins

• All coding is done in Java, JSP and HTML-based code
• AJAX library and data model definitions and usage enable developers to reuse existing LongJump functions and UI
• Plug-in available for Eclipse IDE

Extensive Customization to Business Building Blocks

• Custom actionable data definitions provide the ability to manipulate data as needed or launch custom processes
• Custom component definitions provide the ability to define reusable components
• Custom Java class definitions enable defining and reusing classes across the platform
• Custom page definitions make completely unique UI experiences available to use within internal web tabs and via custom actions

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and RESTful Web Services

• APIs support both SOAP message responses over HTTP/HTTPS and custom Java-bean scripting
• APIs can trigger workflow processes using SOAP and RESTful web services
• Inbound and outbound SOAP messaging support to connect to external systems
• Update of existing RESTful web services API for data integration with external systems

Free to Existing Customers / Free Trial Usage Available

The LongJump Development Suite is available immediately and is a free upgrade for existing users of the platform. LongJump is currently offering a free 30-day evaluation here: www.longjump.com/devsuite.

About LongJump

Based in Sunnyvale, California, LongJump is a service of Relationals Inc., a privately-held, proven provider of on-demand CRM and SFA business applications to more than 150 enterprise companies. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog of highly customizable, business applications help companies reduces the time and cost of developing and delivering data-driven applications. Its business building blocks let developers and corporate IT teams gain significant time-to-value, since they can bypass the need to repeatedly recreate common business processes and functions. LongJump is the first platform-as-a-service provider to bring robust customization, integration, and powerful functionality to businesses of all sizes, enabling them to quickly design, implement and do further customization in an easy, affordable way. For more information, visit www.longjump.com or call 800.886.9028.

Editor’s Note: The 451 Group’s report, “Built to order: what’s next for the platform-as-a-service market?” referenced above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored by nor otherwise funded directly by LongJump. The report and its contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2008, and are reproduced here by permission. The report is available at www.the451group.com.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, developers, eclipse plug-in, java, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, rest, soap, the 451 group

• Basic concepts of PaaS, e.g. benefits, technology, potential risks and hurdles, etc.
• Applications suitable for PaaS
• Roadmap for successful adoption and integration
• Q&A

Date:
Wed., Sept. 24, 2008

Time:
8am Pacific Time
11am Eastern Time

Duration:
1 hour

Speaker:
Derek Cheng,
Director of Products and Marketing,
LongJump

To register:
http://www.longjump.com/paas-webinar/land/paas-webinar-sep08.htm

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud computing, PaaS, Web2.0

The panel discussed how PaaS addresses the Long Tail of IT applications where vendors like Oracle, SAP are not focusing. IT, despite being resource constrained, can still provide the business with these apps using PaaS and still have enterprise levels of integration across their other applications and databases. Additionally, the panel also talked about their respective approaches to convincing developers on using their platforms either via leveraging Java and established database design skills or more proprietary languages like APEX (Force.com) that is similar to Java and C#.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, PaaS, saas

They often run $100-million or more to make. The reason is that every movie project is a product; fully conceived and produced from the lines in the script to the distributed prints that get sent out to the movie theater. Hollywood studios often have to create everything from scratch, and most of the time, have to recreate entire worlds for every different movie. That might work in the entertainment industry or in art, but if IT services outside core business functions took that approach, it’d be a plot for disaster.

To understand how IT has gotten to where it is today, we need to examine how new applications are introduced.

Application Development and Deployment 1.0

Traditionally, IT would have to purchase physical hardware and then deploy some type of application infrastructure. That includes web servers, application servers, databases, creating application frameworks, etc. Of course, that means someone has to manage each of those layers. Scalability, data recovery and security issues also come into play. In many cases, much of the resource time and costs involved in building occur before the application has ever been defined.

Then application managers and architects are tasked with:

• Requirements gathering
• Designing and creating data models
• Designing user interfaces
• Mapping out workflows and processes
• Building connectors to external systems

Invariably, the endeavor involves essentially developing, quality assuring and releasing a complete software product. This internal product comes burdened with a list of technical, business and review requirements, a series of development cycles, and a complete application infrastructure that is specific for that one type of operation. It also needs to have some method for connecting to existing systems.

In the process of pulling together even simple applications, developers will have to find ways to build or buy application components for security access controls, user authentication, data view management, reports and dashboards, custom processing, and much more. Businesses often bring in independent contractors or services companies or platform specialists.

The IT application portfolio gets thicker with more vendors, more off-the-shelf software and an increasing number of sub-projects. Applications take on a life of their own, which is why entire suites of solutions are geared towards application lifecycle management.

Let’s also add that features that are developed in these silos often cannot be leveraged into other applications. They are disconnected and separate. This drives the cost of maintenance sky high and results in unpredictable IT spending whenever that application needs to be updated.

Ultimately, the application becomes its own silo and development teams have to reinvent the wheel for every new business problem or application function. Over time, multiple silos start appearing and management of these fragmented applications becomes more complex and expensive.

Application Development and Deployment 2.0

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like LongJump can add significant value to enterprise IT by enabling IT to better serve the business, operate at a strategic level with business divisions and rapidly deliver application solutions to business partners.

PaaS enables IT organizations and their CIOs to do more faster and for less. They are able to deliver on-demand business applications quickly and easily to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis. PaaS solutions reduce the complexity of custom applications across the organization, enabling better use of the IT dollar and improving overall processes.

Technorati Tags: application development, custom applications, IT projects, IT silos, Longjump, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

At the conference, LongJump CEO, Pankaj Malviya, will be participating in the Platform as a Service Panel on Sept 4, 2:15 – 3:00pm. Other panel participants include Rob Bernshteyn (SuccessFactors), Anshu Sharma (Salesforce.com), Raju Vegesna (Zoho). Hear them discuss how vendors are addressing the needs of developers, covering technical architectures, development methodologies, and best practices. If you’re planning to attend the conference, make sure not to miss this panel discussion.

Technorati Tags: Applications, best practice, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud, Longjump, PaaS, Platform, saas, Sales and CRM, Service

This makes yet another case for SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions. Many organizations are under the false belief that traditional, on-premise systems are safer and more reliable than leveraged enterprise software that is offered on-demand. In the case with Childs, his IT terrorism is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars. However, if San Francisco’s data were hosted, a simple call to the application provider (with proof of administrative creditials) could have restored access in minutes, as well as lock-out Childs from any future access. Hosted software providers are like an additional safety firewall for businesses.

Most SaaS providers like LongJump operate on fully-monitored, secured backends. Data is mirrored, backed up on a daily basis, and an entire operational workflow is engaged before critical changes are made. In addition, people with access to sensitive systems are screened and no one has “exclusive rights.” A third party SaaS provider can quickly correct these types of catastrophes (which thankfully are rare, but always possible) and save organizations like the City of San Francisco the cost and embarassment of a renegade IT terrorist.

Technorati Tags: hosted software, IT administration, on-demand, on-premise, saas, San Francisco, software-as-a-service, Terry Childs

We sat down with Sheela Sarva who works with the LongJump Support Team to talk about building applications on LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, and what are some of the challenges for businesses before they jump in.

Q. Hi, Sheela. Can you tell us what you do at LongJump?
A. I work on the support team, primarily focused helping customers with new application development. It’s a very interesting position because we learn about a lot of the different challenges business users and IT departments have and how they are trying to solve them on the LongJump platform.

Q. So what kind of applications are customers trying to build on LongJump?
A. Well, the best applications LongJump can support involve information management, passing information from one user to another, or pulling information from a lot of different people and sources to build some analysis or to trigger some actions around that data. It sounds simple, but when you factor in all the IT infrastructure that needs to go into these applications, LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service solution really removes the IT management issues and gets to the heart of the business problem.

Q. How do these businesses usually handle these issues?
A. Most organizations don’t have time to think about their problems in a structured way. We see many of our customers going right to their Excel spreadsheet, rather than trying to model their situation in a relational way. Databases can be hard to use, especially when you start sharing information or trying to build reports. And with all the IT staff usually taxed with mission critical problems, a lot of the smaller, but still complex issues don’t get the time of day they need.

Q. And that’s the advantage LongJump provides…
A. Yeah. Definitely. Spreadsheets are great because they’re fast. But spreadsheets can become monsterous if you have a lot of related information. What’s nice is that the time it would take you to model the information in LongJump is about as fast as building a spreadsheet but you get the benefits of that relational data. Then you do all of your reporting or create actions on top of the data (like triggering an email or running a JumpScript), and you’re 80 – 90% finished with the application in most cases.

Q. So what’s the first thing someone should think about before they start creating an application on LongJump?
A. You have to start with the data, or even more basic, what’s the business problem you’re trying to solve. We had a business that was trying to essentially do a very specialized form of licensing and contract management. They have third party vendors, contracts, international use rights, and each of their products had different software and different distributors. They were managing the whole thing on a 1,000 column x 1,000 row spreadsheet with multiple worksheets. It was amazing. Completely color coded and everything.

Their problem was that they needed to make sure that their product managers could go into a geographic market and verify that a specific device, loaded with a specific software, sold by a specific distributor in that specific country met the licensing rights they had with their third party vendor contracts. If it didn’t, they were at a compliance risk and would have to either negotiate new contracts or pay a penalty. It would take them a couple of weeks to fully analyze the information when the dreaded compliance questions came up.

Q. How did they break down their monster spreadsheet into LongJump?
A. The first thing we asked them to do was individualize the different “players” in this problem. So a vendor became an object in LongJump, the device became another object, distributors another object and so on, until the all physical aspects of the problem were represented as data objects that could now be related.

Q. How long did that take?
A. Well, given that they didn’t spend their entire workday on it, it probably took them a couple of hours to think about how to break down the information in a relational way. That also included what field information to map out as part of that object.

Once that basic object data model was identified, building it in LongJump took minutes. Then we ran a few test records to it based on some of the data from their spreadsheet, just to make sure that information was completely linked. When we verified that the data pretty much looked like what it needed to, we started importing their data which took less than half-an-hour.

Q. But that’s just modeling and importing the data.
A. Right, but that’s the hardest part for most people — to learn to think relationally. But once the application is modeled and the data is imported, you can sort of let users ride the application on their own by adding reports and putting dashboards on their home tab to monitor information. They also added alerts to information themselves, so if a contract was coming due or someone added a new license, their core team would get an email alerting them using our Data Policies of the details. Plus, their product managers could get their own view into the data, see the products they were responsible for, and track and add their own information as well. That’s all stuff, if you have to create your own application platform from scratch, you’d have to compensate for.

Q. So that’s a basic application anyone can build.
A. Yes, basic, but still very complex. It just took a little forethought as to how information should be treated as relational objects. But once it’s done, you can’t imagine the time savings. They can now react to problems they know they need to act on, they can quickly look at just the information they need, and they can move on to other more important areas of the business instead of spending time combing and analyzing their data. And they have a single point of truth for their entire team to work from.

Technorati Tags: application development, enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, spreadsheets

Our support and engineering teams will contribute to the site, as well as our partners.

Like all good technical documentation, the LongJump Support Wiki will be a living document, growing and refining as we have more use cases and features to talk about. The goal for our customers is to be able to find up-to-date information quickly and easily to solve their problems or get information. This is never more true than with LongJump’s focus on our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution.

Below is the complete article:

The Long Tail of IT
Pankaj Malviya, June 25, 2008

Everyone who has worked in — or even with — an IT department knows that the demand for projects always exceeds IT’s ability to deliver them all. IT is able to address only those most highly prioritized, core business projects that receive the budget, staff and priority to develop, test, deliver and maintain over time. If projects don’t make the “A” list, the project either doesn’t get done or workers have to find a way to do it themselves.

Today’s more tech-savvy, Web 2.0 workforce has increasingly resorted to getting the tools it needs from SaaS software providers. In an ideal world, IT must be an active partner in prescribing technology to help the rest of the business work better together, move information efficiently, and get the answers needed to make the next strategic or tactical decisions. This is what the Long Tail of IT is all about: really important IT automation projects that would help the business but that consistently don’t make the list of must-do projects.

The platform-as-a-service evolution that is starting to emerge (for example, with solutions from Amazon, Google and LongJump) is one that has potential to restore the luster of the IT department, because these solutions are focused on delivering “customized, situational applications” that connect to a range of common and uncommon processes.

Platform-as-a-service provides a turnkey environment to build applications that teams can use to share data and collaborate. There is no infrastructure to install, and the time and cost to build, deploy and customize new applications is greatly reduced.

PaaS solutions should also be able to integrate with other sources of data using simple web-services APIs. Connecting to enterprise data sources securely is fundamental. Additionally, customization is extremely important; applications that are created must meet the unique requirements of businesses. PaaS should provide a visual way to create new forms, model and automate processes and workflows, and implement actionable data policies.

Rather than needing to work with a one-size-fits-all application (and an extensive, dedicated IT architecture), PaaS platforms need to be able to draw from functional domain experts from Marketing to Sales to HR to easily customize applications, or quickly create and publish situational applications, that are better suited to their unique business requirements. The PaaS platforms also need to deliver enterprise-level service, security, and hardware and software architecture, as well as rich functionality for each application, ranging from configurable dashboard widgets to a flexible database architecture that enables extensive relationships between application data, search capabilities across all applications, etc.

PaaS’ rise is built upon need. The fact that PaaS is on demand and in the cloud is driven by the reality that IT isn’t able to support its multi-departmental constituents with a flexible business platform of information and collaboration. Information workers don’t have time to build a server, manage a database, design a UI, etc. PaaS offers a convenient, predictable, leverageable alternative to yesterday’s big IT initiatives.

That doesn’t mean IT is off the hook, however. In fact, PaaS needs IT to succeed. Not just to bless the technology around security and scalability issues, but to be the guiding light of information management:

• How do you organize your data permissions?
• What data needs to connect to other data to form applications?
• Do the new applications meet required compliance standards for users’ data protection? What should that data and application look like?
• How much is customer-facing, and how much is back-end?
• What external systems need to connect to this data?

PaaS gives IT something it never had: the ability to manage the ‘I’ without the need for too much ‘T.’ No hardware to install; no database to optimize; no web servers to update. PaaS provides structured, centralized data and processes that are enterprise-agnostic. The focus is then realigned on the applications one can build and the business problems one can solve, not on the technology that built them.

Pankaj Malviya is the Founder & CEO of LongJump.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GigaOm, IT department, on-demand, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

It’s very clear that the infrustructure of web products and components is starting to consolidate into ready-to-go solutions from hosting, applications, and (like LongJump) complete enterprise application development plaforms.

According to Om Malik:

The platforms on which we have done business for over a decade are starting to provide diminishing returns; the smart money, meanwhile, is seeking new platform structures.

We completely agree with Om’s assessment. The time is certainly right for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like LongJump. With functionality on the web ever improving, the need to drive down operational costs always looming, the agility of a business a paramount importance, it’s only a matter of time for enterprises large and small to move some key areas of their business on the grid.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GigaOm, IT department, on-demand, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Company Appoints Vice President of Business Development to Lead Newly Unveiled Partner Program and Drive Channel Strategy

Sunnyvale, CA May 19, 2008 — LongJump, a platform for highly customizable, interconnected on-demand business applications, announced today that it has appointed Jay Noble as its new Vice President of Business Development. Noble brings with him more than 20 years of enterprise-level consulting and implementation experience as well as a solid track record of sales and marketing successes, overseeing CRM-focused project implementations and teams. In his new role, Noble will spearhead the company’s sales and partner channel strategy.

Noble’s appointment follows closely on LongJump’s recently unveiled Jumpstart Partner Program, which was developed for resellers who want to leverage a true enterprise-grade, multi-tenant, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and deliver database-driven custom applications that meet their customers’ needs. The program provides partners with an exceptionally attractive incremental revenue channel where they can monetize LongJump’s application platform with their own premium services, while benefiting from LongJump’s support of lead generation campaigns, business opportunity referrals, and generous multi-year commission plans.

“Until now, there has not been a SaaS provider that has developed a compelling channel proposition for partners, which is absolutely essential to bring SaaS to more businesses,” noted LongJump’s founder and CEO, Pankaj Malviya. “Jay’s experience and success on the reseller side provides LongJump with an important perspective into what the VAR and developer partners need from SaaS vendors to expand their revenue opportunities.”

Noble has a wealth of knowledge in sales, marketing, and customer support, and has led numerous implementations of enterprise CRM software at global companies, including Apple, Sybase and Hawaiian Telecom. Prior to joining LongJump, Noble served as President of North American Operations for saaspoint, a leading Salesforce.com implementation partner, where he helped deliver several major projects at Fortune 1,000 companies. Previously, Noble spent four years as a top senior manager and CRM practice leader at BearingPoint. In this role, Noble spearheaded several multi-million dollar systems integration projects within Fortune 500 companies and was a key member of the PeopleSoft and Salesforce.com alliance teams.

“LongJump’s on-demand platform is trailblazing how enterprises of all sizes can collaborate, manage information, and simplify business process optimization,” stated Noble. “The LongJump team demonstrates a focus and commitment to truly help our channel partners maximize their revenue potential with LongJump’s suite of interconnected applications.”

Noble holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management from Oral Roberts University. He currently resides in San Jose, California.

Technorati Tags: customer relationship management, on-demand, PaaS, saas, Sales and CRM

Recently, there was a news report on how a lot of families are dealing with the (possible) recession by growing their own fruits and vegetables. Makes perfect sense. It cuts down on expensive gas, its self-replenishing, and you can grow what you need. It also is tasty and satisifying. What’s the point?

There is a term in sales called “low-hanging fruit,” identifying prospects and customers that you can capture and sell to quickly without a lot of background work or negotiation. In sales, being able to identify which businesses are due for some type of re-marketing or outreach, can reduce the chances of existing easy revenue slipping through the cracks. Its easier to sell repeat business than it is to start from scratch.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a restaurateur and you keep contact with your frequent patrons that come to your restaurant. CRM Solutions like LongJump’s Sales Force Automation suite would enable you to pull data from your cash registers and let you analyze across both data sets when one of your regulars hasn’t paid a visit in a few weeks.

How can you use this valuable customer information? Add an email marketing campaign with LongJump Campaign Manager to repeat each week for all your missing regulars with a “we miss you” type message, a coupon for something unique like a free bottle of house wine with dinner for two, and a tantalizing list of new menu items.

If they come, again push that register data back into LongJump, and send that customer a thank you, with the same offer that they can pass along to one of their friends.

You’ve now created a low-cost, self-replenishing, referral-driven campaign.

Technorati Tags: customer relationship management, on-demand, saas, Sales and CRM