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

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

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

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

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

If you’re a team of 10 or more, relying on contact management software to run your business is a lot like dialing up each member of your team individually and asking “how’s it going” and trying to condense that into actionable intelligence.

Part of what makes real CRMs so powerful is establishing a sales portal for all necessary information regarding accounts. This involves pooling data from various internal business systems and often requires a commitment to help from IT departments. LongJump can provide all the necessary integration points, enabling internal organizations to establish the necessary project requirements within their teams to get the data.

Data integration is critically important to getting sales teams to actively use the tool because of the time-savings they achieve by gaining a 360º view of a customer in single screen, including their orders, customer issues, credit status, finance notes, contract detail, credit limits, contacts, etc.

This complete view of the customers is what enables people to break away from emails, spreadsheets, physical file folders and sticky notes as the convenience choice. And it allows the business itself to maintain a record of account activities and contacts for seamless hand-off to other Reps or teams when assignments change. LongJump provides that view of all the customer data you need.

LongJump is designed to integrate with existing enterprise data using a variety of methods (including REST-based Web Services). And once that data comes into the platform, a series of actionable processes can be put into place, automatically triggering workflows, emails, tasks, SOAP messages, changes in the data, or even internal scripts to further automate business processes. And LongJump’s reporting engine enables even the most basic user to design reports based on mashed up data.

In short, there is no comparison to LongJump with your run-of-the-mill contact management software.

Pankaj states that when you are bootstrapping on your own, the key is working every customer relationship to its full potential so you can build revenue as well as an enduring customer.

Email marketing campaigns deliver a lot of information while also providing measureable results in both how many people see your message (opens) and how many actively wanted more information (clicks). You also capture information about prospects that don’t want to be bothered (unsubscribes).

In the past, CRM users had to employ a separate email delivery service to send whitelisted bulk emails to your constituents. This limited your ability to track the results of your campaigns as they related to new sales opportunities. You either had to pay for an additional service, pay for integration between two services, or manually reconcile campaign results with existing CRM data.

By combining CRM sales force automation and email campaigning in one application as LongJump does, you can specify your lead, prospect, and account targets, embedded personal information into each email, and measure results across your sales cycle.

Here are some terms you should be familiar with when using email marketing:

• Whitelisting – Known spammers are often blacklisted by networking agencies and email filters. A whitelisted delivery service is one that has commited resources and efforts to maintaining a good standing with these filters and ensure greater delivery of emails.
• HTML – Emails that are formatted in HTML are similar to web pages with links, images and table layouts. You’ll want to remember to not use Flash, animated graphics, and frames most email readers do not support them.
• List Management – Rather than importing names from wherever you get leads into your other CRM data (which can lead to duplication, bad data, and a lot of cold leads), it is often better to manage multiple lists individually. This allows you to send a specific group a certain set of information.
• Personalization – Like a mail-merge letter, including information about that particular person in your email adds a level of personalization which also improves the chance that your message will be heard. This can be done by embedding variables into the email template that call out fields like ‘first name,’ or ‘company name.’
• Callbacks – Callbacks are tasks or emails that are automatically triggered when the receiver of your email takes some action (open, click, open and click). This provides a proactive way to follow-up on a customer.

One other thing to keep in mind is content. As stated earlier, education is a very powerful tool in the sales process. That’s why newsletters make excellent campaigns. They provide the reader with information that will help them improve their situation in an unobtrusive way. Meanwhile, it positions you as a reputable source of useful information. The better your content is, the better your chance that they will forward the newsletter to colleagues and peers or look forward to the next email from you.

But salespeople are becoming more mobile, customer relationships are becoming more complex, and staffing is more volatile.

What do you do when a member of your team leaves or is out of the office? How do you maintain the connections to those customers? Do you know what the status of their deals are? What is your revenue outlook for the next month?

Businesses today have to convey much more information to manage their activities than just set up a meeting here or there. In short, selling and managing a customer relationship go hand-in-hand.

To maintain measurable success, you need to be able to:

• Centrally access and manage your customer information
• Share that same information with your team members securely and with necessary territorial controls
• Reduce the time and complexity it takes to report individual sales activities
• Automate common practices and processes
• Monitor and measure individual and team success
• Effectively target prospects for new business and existing customers for repeat business
• Provide multiple ways to communicate to those customers
• Build on customer data with information relating to opportunities, products/services/projects, customer feedback, referrals, accounting, etc.

Contact managers put too much sales information on an island, making collaboration and the management of customer information difficult. It also significantly increases the risk that you lose that data. A hard drive crash or stolen computer can debilitate you for weeks.

These are all factors to keep in mind as you evolve your operations into a sales force automation or CRM solution. An SFA or CRM will allow you to put your sales and customer activities together for a greater, more holistic approach to developing an ongoing relationship with that customer and hence, your business.

• Perceived busywork – Sales reps have to enter information about their activities, log opportunity information, update customer contacts, and don’t always get any value from it.
• Big brother – CRMs can make sales reps feel as if their every task is being micromanaged.
• Can’t find information – Many sales tracking tools tend to focus on forcing sales teams to adhere to reporting, but few help the individual rep sell more.
• Doesn’t drive new business – Most CRM activities involve what you’re doing, not what you’re doing next. They often don’t provide a way to continue to market to your leads and existing customers.
• Inflexibility – Many CRMs force you to adhere to their conventions and when you want to change it to fit your business, they charge you for it.

So how do you change their minds?

Make Entering Data Easier

Besides prospect, account, and contact data, the most important information is going to be driven by sales activities. That includes customer calls, emails, task status, etc. If it takes a lot of effort for a rep to enter data, it won’t happen. Let’s say they call a customer, but the customer’s not interested right now. Are they going to take the time to record that information, or will they move on to the next prospect? If their performance is based on sales and not data entry, they will almost certainly skip logging that activity, even though you know that that’s still a good prospect at some point. If you give them one place to go and log everything from customer information updates, opportunities, and next steps, you’re going to get better information about activities.

Give Them Valuable Information to Do Their Jobs

The best way for a rep to sell is by understanding the profile of who his customers are and how to strategically go after them. This means having good information about each customer and creating daily tasks that focus on those customers. Whether it’s by ZIP code or last date of purchase, they need to be able to slice and dice their customer data to find the best approach.

Identify Ways They Can Measure Their Own Progress

We’re all a competitive in the business world — especially salespeople. That’s the point of quotas and commissions. When reps see how their doing against their quota, or even against other reps, that’s encouragement to do better.

Enable Them to Re-Market to Their Contacts

Campaigning has traditionally been used as a marketing tool, but in many ways, it’s most valuable as a sales tool. Personalized email campaigns let an individual rep cover a lot of territory but still maintain a certain level of 1-to-1 selling. With a few targeted messages, automated follow-ups when the reader clicks or opens an email, and the ability to customize emails to fit the call to action, sales teams can drive a lot more opportunities more efficiently.

Design and Automate Best Practices

All efficient people have a lazy streak. They want to accomplish as much as they can with as little work as possible. That gives them time to deal with the more complex issues or to try new things, which can advances them even further. For salespeople, the more automated you can make a CRM, the more intelligent it can become and, ultimately, the more productive they can be. Creating data policies is a great way to do that. For example, if a new prospect is introduced and there is data indicating their interest in “Trucks,” a completely differ selling process can start for that prospect.

Salespeople don’t really hate CRMs. They hate that they don’t work like they do. The more a CRM can work in concert with their activities, the more successful your CRM implementation will go. And once you win them over, they won’t be able to live without it.