As a developer you are the tailor, with access to configuration-ready suits and the ability to make edits to a suit as needed. You work with your customer, understand their needs, and guide them to the right configuration for their purpose. You help them try on the closest suit possible to what they need, and then you do your finishing work after you’ve met. When your customer comes back, together you try on the fitted suit and hopefully it is exactly what they need at that time. As that customer grows (or shrinks), you can help modify the suit so they get the most life out if it as possible.

What don’t you do? You don’t weave and dye your own fabric. You don’t re-invent cuts or create your own button holes. You don’t make your own buttons. In short, you don’t start from scratch. The result is that suits are made faster and relatively less expensively, and your customer gets what they want.

Agile Developing for the Enterprise Using PaaS

As more businesses and organizations begin to adopt agile methodologies to improve customer responsiveness and rapidly develop applications, it would seem that software tools have to be agile-ready. So far, most of the focus on those agile tools happens to be on the project management and delivery lifecycle phases, but what about the actual development of applications? Developers must examine how application creation tools can best support agile software development as a business strategy.

One example that comes to mind is the development of internal business applications. In the past, it was virtually impossible to build custom, enterprise-grade applications for every department. Now, because the current generation of users is so web savvy, having to deal with hard-coded legacy database applications and spreadsheets is not only ill-conceived and impossible to manage, it can ultimately lead to increases in operating costs and be rife with error.

The primary response from IT organizations has been to decouple the information from the application. Such is the nature of SOA/XML. That’s fine for the IT developer, but completely unusable from a departmental end-user standpoint – the people who have to use the data and face the information management challenges on a daily basis. They still have to rely on an in-house development resource or highly paid consultant to get to that data in a meaningful way that integrates with their work processes.

PaaS can be the ideal solution to solve that problem by making it extremely easy to design, develop, adapt and service web-based applications, while leveraging a comprehensive enterprise-class service environment. It is so easy to build apps that a significant amount of development and changes can be realized in a single meeting or overnight. This gives the user access to new functionality almost immediately. And very savvy users can even make the modifications themselves – simply by changing configuration options – offloading minor development tasks from the coders.

Our new whitepaper “PaaS and Agile Development: The Application Platform for Enterprise Transformation” covers everything a CIO, software product manager, scrum master, or architect needs to know about leveraging PaaS as part of an Agile strategy.

Technorati Tags: agile development, agile manifesto, agile processes, application development, cloud computing, extreme programming, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

LongJump, a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software provider, announced the availability of Version 7.0 of their application platform which adds a range of collaboration capabilities for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. This new release focuses on helping ISVs (independent software vendors), their developers, distributor and partner channels, and customers collaborate seamlessly with each other within the platform.

Says LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya:

“SaaS technology vendors today must address the fact that web users all want to work better together. LongJump Version 7 provides a premier platform for addressing social networking, community building, and collaboration that naturally extends into enterprise business applications.”

You can read the entire press release here.

Technorati Tags: developers, isv, PaaS, saas, var

We’ve introduced a new library of videos that cover the deep set of features within LongJump’s public and private cloud PaaS. Over time, this library will be extended and refined so that businesses, developers, partners and ISVs interested in LongJump’s SaaS application platform can quickly watch a short video on the features that matter to them most.

You can watch these videos from our website at http://www.longjump.com and by clicking on Video Tour on any of the web pages.

The library covers the platform’s major areas including:

• Application Design
• Development
• Reports
• Access Controls
• Productivity Features
• Personalization
• Release Management
• Distribution
• Maintenance

The videos are also available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/LongJumpVid.

Of course, no video can do what a live demo can, so you can also contact us for a complete walk-thru or sign-up for a free trial.

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

Recognized for creating new opportunities in cloud computing and SaaS

SUNNYVALE, CA, April 16, 2010 — LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnDemand Top 100 winners. Inclusion in the OnDemand 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. LongJump was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

View the complete release here.

Technorati Tags: alwayson, cloud computing, PaaS, saas, software-as-a-service

Many thanks to Adam Day, VP of Business Development at HRAnswerlink for his participation on describing how his firm was able to leverage LongJump’s on-premise PaaS to drive rapid deployment of their new SaaS offerings.

This follows past eSeminars including:

• Cloud Computing, SaaS and Its Impact on Channel Solution Providers

• New Strategies For Building Business Applications In 2010

If you’d like to view this eSeminar and any in the past that cover SaaS, PaaS and Cloud Computing, you can click here for recorded archives.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, enterprise, enterprise applications, isv, IT department, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

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

PaaS is the next transformational wave in software-as-a-service and it’s already here. Are you ready? Join us for an insightful and practical examination of PaaS and its effect on how businesses can accelerate SaaS application development.

Stefan Ried, Senior Analyst at Forrester will share the latest Forrester research on PaaS as it relates to public and private cloud implementations and how enterprises, ISVs and IT outsourcers can take full advantage of its unique properties.

This webinar will also uncover the platform elements you need to execute a comprehensive PaaS strategy including:

• Rapid design tools for modeling data and processes
• Standards based software development
• Public, private and virtual private cloud options
• Integrated ISV/VAR/Outsourcer features (subscriber management, billing, etc.)

When
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
@12PM Pacific Daylight Time (@3PM Eastern Daylight Time)

Presenters
Stefan Ried, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Rick McEachern, EVP Business Development, LongJump
Pankaj Malviya, CEO and Co-Founder, LongJump

Click to register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/519899832

Technorati Tags: application development, enterprise, forrester, isv, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

But there is clear trend towards SaaS and the Public Cloud, especially when businesses require higher productivity for less investment as we move to all things digital and accessible.

From where LongJump sits, we do see Private Clouds still being necessary. That’s why we do have an option for ISVs and partner businesses to fully install our entire platform and host it themselves. There is just some information you can’t put into distribution that even hint at a security compromise, whether it is sensitive financial information, intellectual property, health records, or legal information.

Obviously the attraction of Public Cloud solutions is clear:

• No IT commitment or investment
• Highly scalable and encourages growth
• Recurring revenue
• Remote management

In the end, the question for VARs, MSPs, and solution providers is: “What will my customers be willing to do to save some serious money?”

If you have both, find a partner who can do both.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crn, hosted software, isv, msp, private cloud, public cloud, saas, var

ChannelWeb has recognized LongJump as one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Companies, positioning it with the likes of Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. This comes on the heels of last week’s naming of LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to their list of Top 25 Technology Thought Leaders. As indicated by ChannelWeb,

“LongJump is actively rounding up ISVs to brand and host their own SaaS offerings.”

The channel community is one area where cloud computing can truly be a “sky’s the limit” proposition. With all that experience in IT and application services, VARs, MSPs, and solution providers can realize significant potential creating vertical applications that meet the needs of businesses across the globe.

It is likely why ChannelWeb is actively discussing cloud computing:

“Cloud computing platforms facilitate and ease the deployment of applications into the cloud, limiting the cost and complexity by cutting the need to buy and manage hardware and software. As cloud computing continues to gather steam and more VARs and their clients are looking to design, develop, test, deploy and host apps in the cloud, a robust, flexible platform has become a must-have.”

Technorati Tags: channelweb, cloud computing, crn, isv, msp, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, var

ChannelWeb has named our CEO Pankaj Malviya one of the top 25 Technology Thought Leaders. Specifically, editors were most impressed that:

“Malviya is breaking new ground in the cloud computing market with LongJump, an innovative software company with an end-to-end cloud platform. The LongJump offering is winning raves from solution providers for its flexibility and firepower. It’s also garnered a number of awards including Everything Channel’s XChange Tech Innovator’s Xcellence award and a place in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.”

Says Pankaj:

“I’m honored to be selected as a thought leader with the likes of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Ray Ozzie and Donald Ferguson. It is a testament to the eventual tide-shift that has emerged through cloud computing technologies for enterprises of all sizes and their critical relationship with channel solution providers and ISVs.”

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, everythingchannel, gartner, magic quadrant, pankaj malviya, xchange

Scott Dahlgren at The VAR Guy posted an article today about how VARs, solution providers, MSPs and others in the IT channel can really capitalize on cloud computing. Specifically he looks at how the PaaS model presents the widest opportunity for the channel to be involved in the cloud. He states:

The current trend is improving time to market and time to revenue which is greatly dependent on how quickly you can build and deploy an application. The opportunity to add value now is not so much in technical competency but in a Partner’s understanding of the business problem that needs to be solved and then building that application in a way that adds the most immediate value to the business.

He also highlights the LongJump partner program:

LongJump launched their VAR program last quarter that provides a development platform, backup, storage, ability to scale easily, network, security, and pre-built applications for $15/user/month. Partners can then develop web applications and sell them for whatever price they choose.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, it channel, msp, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, solution provider, thevarguy, var

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge had a thoughtful post regarding the challenges facing IT in determining how much to rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms to deliver applications versus running those applications on their own internal infrastructure. He adds:

The real question IT organizations might want to ask themselves in 2010 is why they have to make this kind of decision in the first place. In an ideal world, IT organizations should be able to develop an application that can be dynamically deployed as a service or on their own local infrastructure as they see fit.

You can read the entire article here.

Technorati Tags: application development, enterprise applications, IT projects, on-premise, saas

The LongJump platform made its debut on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Applications Servers. Incidentally, we were one of only two PaaS-capable platforms to be featured, and the only one which could operate as a PaaS and on-premise. Pankaj Malviya, CEO and Founder of LongJump, had this to say:

“We believe LongJump’s placement in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant demonstrates that PaaS is emerging as a true alternative for enterprises in the application server market. Application platforms in the cloud are ideal for building and delivering innovative enterprise-class solutions that meet dynamic business requirements in record time. LongJump squarely addresses a sizable void for powerful, user-configurable, web-based business applications, without compromising the security and control businesses require.”

This realization by Gartner that PaaS must be included in the conversation when it comes to businesses looking at streamlining application development is something we’ve been talking about for awhile and appreciated.

You can view the press release here.

Technorati Tags: application development, application server, cloud computing, gartner, magic quadrant, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

According to ChannelWeb:

The people who made CRN‘s list of the Top 25 Most Innovative Executives of 2009 put big profits into solution provider pockets with breakthrough products and channel programs that cover the most explosive emerging technology markets, from cloud computing to virtualization to VoIP…  innovators pushing the envelope to propel solution providers to new heights.

And specifically about Rick:

McEachern, for his part, a 20-year Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is providing the sales and marketing muscle that is setting LongJump apart from the rest of the pack. Key to that effort is a world-class solution provider program.

Technorati Tags: crn, everythingchannel, msp, rick mceachern, saas, var

Steven Burke of ChannelWeb summarized the major topic at this year’s XChange Tech Innovators conference in Las Vegas. Can you guess? Cloud. Specifically how can the solution provider channel leverage the Cloud as part of their suite of product and service offerings.

Says Burke:

“It’s not too early to call 2010 as the year of the cloud for the channel. Solution providers, from the smallest to the biggest players, were getting their hands around the cloud and planning their 2010 cloud sales strategy.”

With more and more solution providers, VARs and MSPs seeing a compression of their revenue and margins, the Cloud can seem like an additional threat because the first instinct is to associate the Cloud with purely virtualization of services with no delivery or implementation requirements. They might be true for some services that are fairly turnkey like email hosting or antivirus, but for other applications, particularly verticalized applications or departmental management applications like CRM or HR, there is a wealth of possibility in providing implementation, process consulting, etc. And some vendors, like LongJump, even offer the ability to whitelabel a SaaS application (or the entire multitenant platform), allow VAR/MSP partners to state their own pricing, resell prove applications, and maintain the relationship with the customer rather than hand it over to a vendor.

Burke also mentions that LongJump won the Most Innovative Technology award at the event for its ability to enable solution providers to deliver SaaS solutions to their customers.

Technorati Tags: channelweb, cloud computing, crn, everythingchannel, msp, saas, Sales and CRM, steven burke, var, xchange

Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump was at SIIA OnDemand in San Jose last week to showcase the LongJump cloud applications platform. While public and private cloud infrastructure may be top mind, the applications that sit in that cloud also need a revolutionary strategy. LongJump presents a streamlined approach to application development that leverages the shared power of a multitenant business platform to minimize time to market and manual effort.

You can watch the short 6-minute video here.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, custom applications, isv, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, siia

Be sure to visit our website to read about how American Mitigation Law Group, a loan modification company in Del Mar, California is helping homeowners keep their homes during the mortgage crisis. We spoke with Nick Hasselwander at AMLG about how they are using the LongJump platform and CRM to build a complete mitigation workflow for their clients in 30 states.

One of the most compelling points Nick makes is:

“Even though we saw the crisis coming, which is why we were in the market, everything was still happening so fast. Because the industry changed and rules were being added, managing processes was difficult. We would refine a process to a point that it was effective, and then have to scrap it because of new requirements. There were no software tools we could acquire that would instill any best practices. The one thing we could rely on was LongJump enabling us to make changes quickly and transition the team effectively as we continued to refine and redefine new processes.”

Nick and AMLG’s story was also featured in Inside Mortgage Finance (Subscription Required) in a story on Cloud Computing.

Technorati Tags: american mitigation law group, cloud computing, mortgage crisis, mortgage industry

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, Orlando, FL, October 19, 2009 – LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced a value added reseller (VAR) program for its LongJump Cloud Applications Platform from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. LongJump’s reseller program appeals to solution providers, Managed Service Providers (MSP), ISVs and VARs who want to take full advantage of opportunities in the Software-as-a-Service market, generate recurring subscription revenues and leverage LongJump as a platform for the delivery of ongoing custom products and new service offerings. LongJump’s program lets VARs leverage its powerful, multi-tenant cloud platform to launch their own branded SaaS business, build custom database-driven applications or customize LongJump’s existing CRM offering to meet their clients’ specific needs.

In the face of adverse market conditions, businesses are holding back on big ticket IT consulting projects, forcing VARs and solution providers to shift strategies and focus on smaller IT projects. Now is the time for resellers, solution providers and MSPs to diversify their customer offerings by offering SaaS solutions. Forrester estimates by 2016 70% of all SaaS business applications will be built on a PaaS platform, and that the PaaS market will grow to more than $15 billion in 8 years. For software vendors considering adopting SaaS in the short-term, Forrester recommends leveraging an existing PaaS offering to mitigate losing more time-to-market.

LongJump’s VAR program allows VARs to profitably create solutions for large and small projects and offer those solutions to clients on a subscription basis. Leveraging the company’s PaaS provides a way for VARs to directly participate in a SaaS business model by facilitating rapid application development to fulfill clients’ long tail of IT projects, while also creating new recurring revenue streams to help their own bottom line.

“The LongJump VAR program is designed to give resellers and solution providers a profitable and fast way to tap into new cloud revenue streams,” stated Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump. “We are providing our reseller partners with ready-to-use applications and a flexible PaaS solution to capitalize on for ongoing customer application opportunities.”

Program Features Keep Partners in the Driver Seat

LongJump’s VAR program provides real financial advantages to resellers by 1) delivering recurring revenue streams, 2) ensuring that they own the entire customer relationship, and 3) providing a platform for the delivery of additional business process consulting and automation. The program includes:

• Your Business, Your Branding: VARs can offer their own branded solutions to their customers.
• No Program Fees: VARs can quickly get started by offering SaaS products to their customers.
• Recurring Revenues: VARs earn recurring revenue based on the pricing they set for their customers. Wholesale service price is NOT a percentage of revenue.
• No Hardware or Software to License: LongJump’s multi-tenant platform is fully hosted, eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and operations costs.
• VAR Customer Control: The reseller will always be the customer’s point of contact. Resellers manage billing and support so that customers are not faced with the hassle of having to deal with different vendors, contracts, etc
• Platform and Product Training: LongJump will provide free training for resellers to certify them on the platform and help them understand how to create and customize client solutions.
• Technical Sales Support: For sales situations where technical expertise can help close a contract, LongJump will work with the reseller as a member of their team to provide answers to customers.
• Sales and Marketing Materials: Partners will be supplied with relevant sales and marketing materials that can be customized, including datasheets, white papers and other documentation about LongJump.

Partners Achieve Success with LongJump

LongJump already counts a number of VARs participating in its program. For example:

• Carlsbad, CA-based Ximix does business with a diverse portfolio of companies in healthcare, military and defense, manufacturing, real estate and financial services and leverages LongJump’s platform having built hundreds of custom applications for HR, billing, employee management, etc. Rob Brown, a Ximix cloud evangelist and consultant, commented, “Good information management is about reducing complexity and PaaS eliminates having to manage a large ecosystem of SaaS vendors. For many organizations, we avoid the cost creep that is associated with more established vendors like Salesforce by developing on LongJump’s PaaS offering, but its real value is its application-agnostic framework which enables delivery of any transactional database-driven application extremely quickly. This means as our clients grow and require changes to their application portfolio, the apps that we prototype and build on LongJump can be extended and reused or translated into new apps on-the-fly — drastically tipping the economy of scale in our favor.”
• Atlanta, GA-based Emery Creek Solutions joined the company’s VAR program to take advantage of customizing its CRM to maximize customer opportunities. “LongJump’s CRM was easy for us to get up and running and customize. It is the most comprehensive CRM product I’ve used,” said Tim Frey, partner at Emery Creek Solutions. “With LongJump, we have been able to integrate our customer information and automate our sales processes, allowing our team to work quickly and more efficiently.”

Pricing and Availability

LongJump delivers enormous value to the channel. LongJump applications and PaaS platform have all the capabilities required for enterprise adoption and is comparable with other PaaS platforms that charge customers from $65 to $200 per user/per month. However, LongJump’s aggressive channel pricing creates a terrific opportunity to channel resellers to start offering branded SaaS solutions to generate recurring revenues.

The LongJump VAR program is available now starting at $15/user/month and includes LongJump’s pre-built and custom applications. Resellers can set the end user pricing.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, forrester, gartner, isv, itxpo, msp, referral, reseller, Sales and CRM, var

Database and technology analyst Ken North examines how Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions help accelerate adoption of the cloud model within organizations. As we have indicated many times ourselves, and Mr. North comes to a similar conclusion:

PaaS solutions have particular appeal for startups, projects with ambitious deadlines, and organizations with a limited budget for capital expenditures. PaaS can remove the capital expenditure roadblock without the burden of diminished functionality. The richness and variety of development environments is one reason the PaaS model has appeal for system integrators and developers, particularly those building web applications. … PaaS has much to offer today to those who are building and integrating systems. PaaS users can create custom solutions and make full use of business process modeling, workflow tools, object modeling, data modeling and packaged applications.

As always, Mr. North’s analysis is very in-depth and is a must read for anyone looking at the varying solutions available for PaaS.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, dr dobbs, ken north, multitenancy, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, techweb

PaaS allows application developers to simply build applications in the cloud, without ever having to worry about hardware acquisition and configuration, software installation, configuration, and maintenance, scalability, availability, backups, recovery, etc. You just sign up and start building, deploy with the push of a button, and pay for your usage as you go.

Bobrowski suggests that enterprises have a real option for cloud computing as some PaaS vendors start offering licensed versions of their platform. He urges enterprises keep their eyes “on the emerging trend of new PaaS and IaaS technologies that are available for licensing within your own data center as you consider how you might transition applications from inside your data center to the cloud.”

He also met with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to get some perspective about how our customers are using our installable business applications platform to develop applications faster.

“We are not exclusively a cloud vendor and PaaS on-demand is just one vehicle for our customers to derive value from the LongJump platform,” LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya told us. “In fact, our customers take a movable application approach so they can develop on one instance (our PaaS, for example), test on another (a LongJump instance on Amazon EC2), and publish on yet another (LongJump in a private hosting environment). Our real value is helping to streamline application development and delivery and being agnostic to the application infrastructure. With more private cloud options entering the market, there is also less risk for businesses because they still don’t have to outlay any hardware to develop and test their applications.”

For the complete piece, click here.

Technorati Tags: amazon ec2, cloud computing, enterprise applications, iaas, on-premise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud

Bill Ives of theAppGap took an extensive look at LongJump‘s application platform recently. The article looks at how LongJump is able to help businesses quickly build an object model, add processing, reporting, and even extend applications using industry standard development tools such as Java. According to Bill:

I can certainly see the benefit fit of using a platform such as LongJump to create web-based applications. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog out of the box intelligent objects can reduce the time and cost of developing and delivering data-driven applications. The business building block approach should allow developers and corporate IT teams to reduce the time to market or deployment, since they can bypass the need to repeatedly recreate common business processes and functions, as well as develop basic web functionality.

The complete article is available here.

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

Pankaj Malviya Examines How Enterprises and ISVs Can Capitalize on Private Clouds for Their SaaS Applications

LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump, will be speaking on emerging cloud computing options for business at IDG CloudWorld™ in a session titled, “Salvation in the Private Cloud: Platforms at Your Service.” The session will be held on Wednesday, August 12, from 3:00 -3:45 p.m. at IDG’s CloudWorld conference held at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

Malviya will examine the growing trend and appeal of “private clouds,” and looks at the advantages of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution used to develop and deliver web-based applications internally within the company’s own servers and behind its own firewall or on another preferred IaaS environment, such as Amazon EC2. For ISVs, private clouds and PaaS position them to offer new business models from a multi-tenant platform that lets them create SaaS applications faster and reduce development costs.

Forrester estimates the PaaS market will grow over eight years to $15.2 billion.  And Gartner predicts the future of corporate IT is in private clouds.  Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Thomas Bittman recently advocated that embracing private clouds not only enables corporate IT the benefits of clouds within the enterprise, but also the flexibility to use public cloud computing services as soon as they mature.

“The flexibility and utility of cloud computing won’t be leveraged by businesses until security and control is addressed. LongJump is one of the only proven PaaS providers that is successfully meeting the needs of enterprises and ISVs by enabling the development of world class SaaS applications within the public and private clouds,” noted Pankaj Malviya.

Malviya is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in enterprise software design, development, and implementation for Fortune 500 companies. In 2006, Malviya founded LongJump as an early cloud player that maintains the position of giving companies control of where their applications are hosted. Some industry experts have noted that LongJump’s highly portable approach is aimed at delivering the “Holy Grail” of cloud computing and even calling the platform “Force.com in a box.”  Notably, Gartner recently named LongJump as the only cloud application platform to earn its “Cool Vendor” designation.

CloudWorld will provide a comprehensive look at this emerging technology that is becoming increasingly important to the enterprise for its cost savings, scalability and agile functionality. For more information on the conference, interested parties can visit: www.cloudworldexpo.com.

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 400 enterprise companies. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog of highly customizable, business applications help companies reduce 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.

About IDG World Expo
IDG World Expo (www.idgworldexpo.com) is a leading producer of tradeshows and events for professionals and consumers seeking world-class education, strategic business relationships, and access to industry-leading products and services. IDG World Expo’s portfolio of conferences and events includes Macworld®, Electronic Entertainment Expo® (E3 Expo®), Next Generation Data Center™ (NGDC™), OpenSource World™, and CloudWorld™. IDG World Expo is a business unit of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research and event company.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, forrester, gartner, isv, on-premise, PaaS, pl, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud

We produced a video articulating what companies that want to build SaaS solutions in the Cloud need to focus on to successfully deliver applications on the web. For a deeper dive, you can also view our presentation on “The Strategy for Bringing SaaS Applications to Market.”

Both also look at how LongJump enables your business to develop and deliver robust software as a service solutions on our application platform quickly so you can focus on your core business.

Here is the video transcript as presented by LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya.

Are you looking to start your journey to building a SaaS business? Well, in our experience, you can expect to encounter a range of obstacles that can keep you from turning your idea into a lasting business.

For example… You will need a multi-tenant architecture if each customer expects to have a unique experience and their own set of configurations. You will need to address how to manage tenants and bill for services. How do you ensure your architecture can meet your performance and scalability requirements? How will you handle application deployment and updates? Those are just the basics to getting your software-as-a-service business up and running.

As you grow, you may look to expand internationally. What will you need to meet localization requirements? Will you work with partners to add to your solutions and extend into an application ecosystem? And how can you offer built-in SOAP and REST support so other systems can get data from your applications?

These considerations for delivering a complete service are just as important as getting to market. But to meet these challenges, ISVs risk pulling resources away from their core competencies.

To this, we offer you LongJump: the proven multi-tenant platform that enables you to rapidly build, manage and deploy a variety of relational database applications, and the foundation of successful SaaS businesses.

In fact, LongJump is the same underlying platform we used to launch Relationals CRM, which is serving hundreds of enterprises, and our ever-growing LongJump.com on-demand service for departments and small business. Now we make this same proven platform available to you to launch your own SaaS business.

LongJump eliminates the need to design and build entire application architectures from scratch, and instead, provides a comprehensive white-labeled platform hosted on your own servers or on the cloud. So instead of putting your energies on technical challenges, you can focus on your core business, reduce your time to market, and move towards building a complete service.

Creating applications can be as easy as browsing the web. Just start by creating relational data objects in a drag-and-drop web environment that are infused with the common business building blocks every organization needs. Quickly add customizable views, reporting, and form controls. Visually configure business rules and workflow processing, as well as a comprehensive set of administrative safeguards. If you need deeper functionality, use our Java API and rich developer toolkit to add custom code. LongJump also provides the application lifecycle tools including packaging, release management, even translation and localization – all in a complete solution that provides high performance, scalability, and security.

The result? Full-featured enterprise applications that are built in a matter of weeks instead of months. LongJump can help deliver solutions to market faster, reduce complexity and save on resources.

There is one more important advantage. With LongJump, you own your customers. You control the relationship, where your business solutions are hosted, SLAs, pricing, and when to release new updates to your customers.

When you combine our rapid application development capabilities and rich feature set with the unprecedented platform control, LongJump truly is the Platform at Your Service.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, hosted software, isv, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Gartner is tracking the hype around Cloud Computing in their latest report “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2009″ and cloud computing’s path towards mainstream acceptance. In particular, it looked at APaaS (Application Platform as a Service) and suggests that it is a transformational technology that is only 2 to 5 years from being adopted by mainstream IT while its initial penetration is less than 1%.

According to Gartner, “application platform as a service (APaaS) is a development and deployment environment for cloud-based applications, offered to IT organizations as a service.” Businesses will likely need to rethink their perspective on applications, as Gartner also states that:

APaaS is a part of a fundamental and discontinuous change in the application platform market. It is part of a larger SaaS and cloud-computing phenomenon, all amounting to one core change — the transition from IT solutions that are conceived, deployed and managed under the control of an enterprise IT department to IT solutions that are applied and composed by the enterprise, but executed and managed by expert third-party providers. It is a step toward greater industrialization of IT, to predictable, dependable, professionally managed, plentiful and agile information resources.

Gartner estimates that most IT organizations are or will in the next five years become partly dependent on SaaS-style software. Some may begin developing their own custom applications on APaaS leading to a change in IT jobs, organizations and budget allocations.

In a separate hype cycle report “Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure, 2009,” Gartner also looked into application infrastructures. There it examined SaaS/Cloud-Enabled Application Platforms, also a transformational technology due to make its mainstream impact in 2 to 5 years. Gartner describes SEAP as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-enabled application programmable platform for the development and deployment of custom applications that is specially designed to support SaaS-style applications. SEAP is inherently multi-tenant and is designed to provide a complete platform for ISVs to develop their own suite of SaaS applications.

Technorati Tags: apaas, cloud computing, gartner, PaaS

China Martens of the 451 Group provided an in-depth Market Insight Service report discussing LongJump and its potential as a PaaS provider inside and outside the corporate firewall. The 451 Group also provided a comprehensive look at where LongJump is in relation to other cloud computing companies and a fairly complete review of the company’s history and trajectory from SaaS provider to offering a multi-tenant application platform for service providers.

LongJump is keenly aware of the challenges it faces in attracting enterprises and ISVs to opt for its PaaS as they take a leap away from Java and .NET and into cloud app development. It’s at the start of what is likely to be a lengthy wooing process and points to its first five ISV customers as a good start in a matter of months. We see LongJump having more stability than some of its pure-play rivals, given its steady-as-it-goes CRM business, and expect it to successfully weather the likely approaching consolidation of small PaaS providers.

In addition, the report states the value opportunity for ISVs:

Companies of all sizes are eager to develop their own SaaS/cloud applications, and some will be particularly interested in the levels of control over branding and deployment that LongJump offers in some of the versions of its platform.

If you are a subscriber to The 451 Group’s research, you can view the complete report here. Access is also available as a trial, or if you would like to receive a copy of the report, leave a comment on this post or on our Twitter feed and we’ll contact you.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, customer relationship management, isv, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud, saas, software-as-a-service, the 451 group

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