• David Carr at InformationWeek talked about how “customers will be able to add social media features to their applications, and also make those applications available to mobile users”
• David Strom at ReadWriteWeb noted “Relay has the look and feel of a Facebook or Twitter news feed that is increasingly being used for a variety of social enterprise applications to show real-time visibility and activities”
• Jason Campbell over at CMSWire had the most provocative point in his analysis comparing LongJump to Salesforce.com
• Andrew Hickey at CRN indicated that resellers, VARs, ISVs and MSPs view is that “the integrated cloud platform gives developers and solution providers the ability to embrace converged cloud, social and mobile applications”
• Kristen Nicole at the SiliconAngle blog definitely made the connection about how important it is to be “creating simplified processes for businesses to utilize their existing data”
• Brittany Farb, who covers technology for DestinationCRM, stated “LongJump is the first platform-as-a-service provider to offer a social and mobile integrated platform, enabling business to take advantage of cloud, social networking, and mobile technologies”
• Mike Vizard, covering IT trends at ITBusinessEdge, notes how Relay and Javelin can solve a key issue affecting today’s small and medium sized enterprises: “One of the problems the average company today has with developing anything that looks like a custom application is all the complexity involved.”

The original release is available here.

**UPDATED**

• I left off a great in-depth interview by Martin Tantow at CloudTimes with Pankaj where they go into LongJump as a company, as a service, and more. Truly a unique piece.

Technorati Tags: andrew hickey, brittany farb, cmswire, crn, david carr, david strom, destinationCRM, informationweek, itbusinessedge, jason campbell, javelin, kristen nicole, mike vizard, mobile computing, online database, readwriteweb, relay, siliconangle, social computing

David Strom over at ReadWriteWeb has a great primer on the range of online database tools on the web. Some of the benefits include:

The process is very straightforward: you either copy and paste data or take your spreadsheet and upload it to the service, after creating accounts for you and your collaborators. Then you can make changes via your Web browser, no other software is required. Some of the services allow for more bells and whistles. Setup time is minimal; your data is properly protected by the service and safe from harm. And you don’t need to learn any Web/database programming skills either.

Right now, many organizations are looking to move away from spreadsheets for record management and process tracking, so it’s a good time to start finding a better way to collaborate around information. After all, there are risks abound with emailing data back and forth or relying on spreadsheets with unknown data quality.

This analysis was based on what David and RWW examined in mid June 2011. He encourages companies to do spend some of time checking out particular features that are deal-makers or breakers. You can do so with LongJump’s free trial program for 14-days. Of course, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact our App Geniuses for help. Moving from a spreadsheet to a database can be tricky when you start modeling your data in a more optimized way.

Technorati Tags: excel, online database, quickbase, spreadsheet, trackvia

Says Ellison:

“Multitenancy is a horrible idea. What it means is, everyone’s data is commingled, everyone’s customer list is in a single database. That’s a horrible security model. In the 21st century, the way we support multiple customers is called ‘virtualization.’”

Certainly Ellison is entitled to his belief (or his right to say it), but let’s face it: the more copies of Oracle you have running (virtual or otherwise), the better it is for Oracle.

Software companies should consider stackware a “horrible SaaS business model” — especially in that it negates the business, operational, and economic value of multitenancy: everything from streamlining deployment operations, improving core development, maximizing common resources, and only repeating what you need, not the entire frigging architecture.

You might even argue that having multiple databases could be considered even less secure because now you’ve created many entry points into your systems and no way of knowing when you need to lock down the entire platform. One more thing: data in a multitenant environment is not “commingled.” Tenant walls, if built properly, still require you to have access rights to see data — access rights that, as just mentioned, can be shut down from a central point. No one freaks out in an apartment building about their neighbors commingling their groceries or sheets.

At Softletter’s SaaS University last week, the topic of multitenancy was a lot more constructive. Several sessions touched on it from establishing a basic understanding of how it works to what is really on the minds of SaaS businesses. Mike Ormerod from Progress Software had an excellent overview and it refutes Ellison’s point, identifying several types of multitenancy in which you can have multiple apps, multiple databases, even multiple architectures. Likewise, our own platform refutes Ellison’s point about a single database as you can build essentially instances between infrastructures that act like tenants, and deploy across instantiations.

That’s not to say you absolutely need multitenancy. If you’re building B2C type solutions or specific point solutions, not having MT is not a deal breaker. But for enterprise class solutions where a lot of complexity happens at the configuration level and where your clients are demanding manageable customization, not having multitenancy can increase your operating and licensing costs dramatically.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, larry ellison, multitenancy, oracle, saas, saas university, softletter

The strength of multi-tenancy is that each of its multitude of individual tenants keeps it constantly evolving. This is in direct contrast to single tenancy, the whole point of which is to limit evolution only to those changes that are perceived to directly benefit the individual tenant. Thus single tenancy misses out on innovations and other advances that are being adopted by competitors, partners and third-party services.

He makes a great case especially in the collaborative aspects of the cloud. But not all multi-tenant architectures are the same.

One reason why single-tenancies still exist is that they are inherently more open to a wide range of users and they can all operate under a single configuration. This is ideal for collaboration. But that can be taken to its own limitations especially in regards to security, specialized processes and workflows, and unique information management.

As we see more business apps evolving into more social components, cloud application platforms are going to need to not only be multi-tenant, but also feature community tenancies.

You still want to maintain segmentation between companies (i.e. tenancies), but you also want to be able to leverage the greater user community as a whole.

Let’s take the federal government as an example. They might have a private cloud in which each department has their own focused tenant. This lets them keep their apps specialized for their own tasks, while also leverages a common architecture and any core apps. But they would also benefit from a bit of cross pollination. Exchanging ideas, working with partners, even internal workforce crowdsourcing. A community tenancy with those kind of applications in mind would be necessary.

So rather than use yet another platform for community apps, your cloud app platform should be ready to support both multi-tenant as well as community tenancies.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, multitenancy, private cloud, saas, software-as-a-service

While we don’t usually review books on this blog, the Manga Guide to Databases deserves some serious attention for LongJump users. Those who are just getting started with relational database design and data modeling will find this guide to be entertaining and extremely comprehensive. And even the most seasoned DB gurus can appreciate just how accessible this guide is. Some of our LongJump engineers are already looking to buy copies for their kids.

Of course this book focuses on very bare bones database development, covering everything from entity-relationship diagramming to database security to data sharing and scalability issues (much of which LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service handles natively without having to write SQL or having to architect a database infrastructure). Still, the courseware provides real “fantasy” world examples complete with theory and exercises, and it does so with humor and clarity.

In fact, this unique approach to learning definitely puts the fun back in the fundamentals. Here’s hoping they develop a Manga Guide to REST Web Services!

Technorati Tags: database, manga, rdbms, relational data, sql

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Friday, April 25, 2008 – Today at the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo, LongJump, a provider of highly customizable, interconnected on-demand business applications, unveiled a “Jumpstart Partner” reseller program.  The new program serves the requirements of resellers, developers, and consultants with either a vertical market focus or a functional business area focus, such as CRM or HR. LongJump helps partners implement their technical expertise and best practices and provide customized consulting services and training to businesses.

LongJump’s Jumpstart Partner Program is ideal for resellers who want to leverage a true multi-tenant, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and deliver custom database-driven applications that meet their customers’ needs.  The program was designed to provide partners with an exceptionally attractive incremental revenue channel where they can monetize LongJump’s platform with their own premium services.

“To stay on the leading edge, resellers want to participate in the growing SaaS market. Therefore, LongJump plans to invest aggressively in our partners through lead generation campaigns, business opportunity referrals and generous multi-year commission plans. We believe that resellers will find LongJump a true partner in growing their business and maximizing revenue-building opportunities,” noted Pankaj Malviya, LongJump’s CEO.

Although SaaS-based solutions are growing in popularity, resellers who have customarily delivered on-premise solutions have looked to leverage the ease of delivery of SaaS but still maintain a strong connection with their customers and provide premium services. With its new program, LongJump will maintain the customer relationship merely from a technology perspective, but the day-to-day relationship with the customer will be owned by each partner.  LongJump’s robust enterprise-grade feature set and uniquely affordable price point also gives partners the opportunity to upsell their services across the entire organization.

The Jumpstart Partner Program has two participation tiers: a Silver Medalist and a premier Gold Medalist level.  Certified partners benefit by having more leads directed to them by LongJump.  There is a one-time program fee for certification, but to kick-start its program, LongJump will waive the program fee for the first 20 partners who sign up at the Gold Medalist level.

As part of its Jumpstart Partner Program, LongJump will provide comprehensive sales tools and materials, sales support for complex deals, lead generation and qualification programs, training and certification designed to rapidly prepare partners to build applications and provide custom implementation services to their existing customers or new ones.  LongJump also plans to participate in co-marketing initiatives with Gold Medalist partners.

For parties interested in signing up, they can visit http://www.longjump.com/partners/partnership-contact.htm.

Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch says in “LongJump Wants You to Stop Pushing Paper Around the Office“:

“This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various ‘in’ and ‘out’ boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.”

Leslie Poston of Profy says in “LongJump Releases New Features“:

“Workflow is a nice addition, not only because it helps all of the features of LongJump work together well, and go to work for you, making sure emails are sent, events are added to the calendar, customers are served promptly and more, but also because it does the same with the third party applications.”

Phil Wainewright of ZDNet analyzes the entire customization trend in “Customization: curse or blessing?”

 ”Smart vendors are the ones that, like LongJump, go the extra mile and actually build applications that their business customers will find useful. This tackles both aspects of the curse of customization: you give people somewhere to start, and you constrain them into choices where you at least have some idea of what their needs are likely to be, so you can make sure you’ve built those needs into the platform already.”

David Sims of TMCNet says:

“Human Resources may establish a customized workflow process for new job candidates, whereby the workflow process takes the potential candidate’s record through multiple hand-offs and stages, including resume review, telephone interview, in-person interview and multiple interviewer sign-offs and approvals.”

If you happen to be in Microsoft’s offices, do stop by the break area where we can show you some of the cool new stuff we’re working on. Our CEO Pankaj Malviya is also going to be presenting an update about our current successes as well as our vision and plan going forward.

By the looks of the companies showcased and our own momentum, it is an exciting time to be providing webware business services and applications as more of your typical backend operations and enterprise data moves necessarily to the web. The on-demand application promise is key to strengthening collaboration, management and information exchange between staff, departments, partners, and customers.

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.

There are times when a VC will let you get away with things, because they’ve already hedge their bets with you by investing in other companies. They might overlook a bad decision and tend not to intervene until it’s too late. Going at it alone forces you to grow within your own means. It’s also the best way to ensure applied innovation – that is, innovation with real revenue potential rather than just a technological potential.

You can read the entire article here.

So what does that mean?

Databases are these storage areas for information – essentially file cabinets converted to digital format. To store data, you have data records, which is data that complies with the structure you’ve defined.

In the case of iTunes, for example, the structure is around songs, artists, and albums (also called objects or tables in database lingo). Each object also has a record structure, for example: a song has a title, length, cost, date, etc. and also points to the album and artist. An artist has their name, description, and all the songs and albums their on. And each album has a name, price, and a collection of songs, and might also be related to a specific artist or artists. Everyone one of these objects might also be categorized as another way to dissect the data.

This is classic relational database structure.

Glue-Based Administration

What’s interesting is that the actual sum of a database’s parts constitutes a nebulous series of pointers or joins hooking one bit of data to another. It’s the glue, if you will. And in the old-school world, unless you’re a database administrator, you’d have no chance of ever changing that data structure. In fact, it often takes teams of people to hold the thing together, because one wrong move and your data can be lost or mangled beyond recognition.

Administrating this data is part of what LongJump has tried to simplify most. LongJump lets you define your structures however you need to and we try to make it bullet-proof for you. The result is that you get away from the management side and start doing stuff with the data, like analysis, running reports, filtering for information, or applying the data to team-processing, project workflow, or data tracking.

Looking Before You Leap (Jump)

But if you’re creating your own application, it always comes back to something even LongJump can’t do for you, which is defining what your data should look like and organizing it in a way that makes sense in a relational database world.

So before you start designing, start mapping out how you think your data should look. In the mean time, here are some nice resources for you to read up more on database theory:

• How Stuff Works: “What are Relational Databases?”
• Dummies.com: “Exploring Database Design Tips”
• In-Depth Write-up by Barbara Knauff of Dartmouth College: “Design Your Own Database, Concept to Implementation”
• LongJump Application Design Guide

We would like to find out from our users, as well as visitors, the types of problems their businesses are facing, and how business applications can help solve those problems. In the past, we have had live coaching clinics to help customers understand how LongJump can help their businesses grow, and we’ll keep you posted on future clinics. In the mean time,  simply leave us a comment – we would love to hear from you.

Gartner, the world’s leading IT research firm, recently released their list of Top 10 Technologies for 2008 that touched on a couple of SaaS-related technologies and trends. Those of you who follow our blog will recall the post I did last week on Software as a Service: Alphabet Soup were I examined some of the emerging terms and acronyms in the SaaS space. In their top 10 list, Gartner talks about the idea of SaaS-related Web Platforms (Web-Oriented Architecture or WOA) as one of the potential next big things.

What is WOA?
Depending on who you ask, WOA (Web-Oriented Architecture) is either SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) on steroids or a web-based “cloud computing” environment. Gartner sees them as “providing service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes”, while other’s like Nick Gall are simply using WOA to refer to SOA that uses a more modern and flexible XML protocol – REST (a less complex method of using XML to communicate with applications) as opposed to SOAP (an older, more complex approach to the same problem).

What about SaaS?
Enough tech-babble and back to business! Gartner points out that “Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010,” and sees web platforms and the natural progression to SaaS. Along with the their previous projections, it looks like the next couple of years will mean good business for SaaS application providers!

Mashups, Composite Apps, and Social Software
Mashups and composite applications continue to enjoy the technology spotlight. For those unfamiliar with these terms, mashups actually come from the music industry and refers to applications that combine data from more than one source into a single application. Composite applications are similar, except they consume enterprise and enterprise-ready sources versus Internet-based sources. Gartner also sees consolidation in the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment (also known as Enterprise 2.0) and companies increasing buying social software and collaborative technologies, good news for companies playing in that space!

Conclusions
Its good to see Gartner continued support of the overall SaaS movement. Some of you old enough to remember know that Gartner has always been a proponent of cost-cutting through it support of technologies and services like network computing, outsourcing and most recently SaaS. Also encouraging is the appetite enterprise continue to have for Web 2.0 technologies and their ability to embrace SaaS as an acceptable software delivery model.