LongJump, a pioneer in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and private cloud business applications, announced today that leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC (www.idc.com) named LongJump as one of five companies in a report published October 4th, 2010.

“We view IDC’s analysis of the advancements in application development and deployment platforms as proof that as more enterprises become comfortable with public and private cloud computing, the process of creating applications will be the next critical strategy to drive innovation and productivity,” says Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump. “There are far too many software solutions that need to be built and trying to do it the traditional way is costly and high-maintenance.”

The complete press release is here on the company’s website.

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

For enterprises and ISVs, it has become more important than ever to support a global workforce. In fact, according to AnythingResearch.com, the translation and interpretation services industry is a $2.7 billion market that has grown an average of 22 percent a year since 2004. The main thrust is the need for U.S. military and businesses expanding overseas as well as the healthcare industry.

Whether you need an application to deliver software solutions in Portuguese, French, or Klingon, chances are the challenge is not so much in software development or even the translation but in having a multi-tenant SaaS platform that can support translation of enterprise-class, web-based applications. In fact, a PaaS architecture is ideal for such requirements.

With LongJump, each individual user can access the platform user interface in their own language, and language definitions are defined at the tenant level. Through the Translation Workbench, you can define new languages and replace all UI labels and alerts based on the selected language.

LongJump’s Bulk Translation and Localization Process

If you’re creating an entire tenant from scratch and want to include support for multiple languages, LongJump provides a fast way to perform bulk translation.

1. LongJump exports all existing UI labels to a CSV file
2. The Enterprise or ISV can then translate the entire contents of the file themselves or take it to a translation firm for interpretation
3. With the new labels, you upload the file back in and choose a name for the language
4. That language then becomes available to the tenant and each individual user can choose it

When you need to update through the bulk process, the new entries will simply overwrite the existing ones. LongJump also provides support for plurals.

Incremental Translation Process

As changes occur to the platform, you might add a new object, process or field for example. Rather than performing a bulk translation process, you can dive into the Translation Workbench and choose the element and then the specific term. We’ve organized the application model into elements for easier reference.

Developer Controls for Translation

One last aspect to LongJump’s Translation Workbench capabilities is allowing the code developer to access the translated elements. The Ajax API, Java API and REST API all support the ability to retrieve the localized message labels. While coding still occurs in the native English, all the presentation results can be displayed based on the language you want.

Technorati Tags: application development, localization tools, PaaS, saas, software localization, software translation, software translation tools

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

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

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

The library covers the platform’s major areas including:

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

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

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

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

Timesheet Manager is a web-based customizable timesheet/timecard management application. It features ready-to-use timesheets that can be related to employee data as well as other objects such as Accounts or Projects.

The app is constructed around three objects.

• The Timesheet object, used for recording weekly timecards for each employee
• The Daily Timecard object, which is the “Detail” object to the Timesheet “Master” object (you can read more about Master-Detail relationships in our wiki)
• The Employee Rate Table object, which is used for “looking up” an hourly rate to fill in some Timesheet values

Some enhancements to the Timesheet Manager go beyond just objects and fields including:

• Using a Formula to set the Default Value for Week Start as the nearest Sunday
• Using a Formula field to automatically determine Week End
• Using a Formula to set the Weekday based on the Daily Timecard Day
• Using Rollup Summary Fields to sum up hours recorded by Daily Timecards to the main Timesheet
• Using a Data Policy to execute Java Code that converts a Rollup Value to a Number Value
• An approval workflow to ensure management sign-off
• Reports for current hours/wages anticipated and approved wages
• Using a Post Selection JavaScript when a user completes an Employee lookup to the Rate Table to automatically retrieve the Hourly Rate

Of course, you can completely modify this app to suit your needs. We’d love to hear your experiences and suggestions on this app as well as any permutations that this app has inspired in your business.

You can Test Drive the Timesheet Manager app here, or install it into your account (Free!).

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, enterprise applications, formula, master-detail, rollup, timecard, timesheet, workflow

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

This follows past eSeminars including:

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

• New Strategies For Building Business Applications In 2010

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

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

I don’t know a single programmer who likes wasted effort. In fact, there’s a beauty to what they do, much like a poet, when they are able to refine and compress layers of code into well-thought out simplicity and modularity. It is this very reason the LongJump platform was created.

So here are some ways that Platform-as-a-Service can make Programmers happy:Cut the Code

One of PaaS’s inherent benefits is about leveraging existing functionality across multiple applications all on one instance. That means specific object models and processes or custom code can be used across all apps running on the platform. You build things once, rather than try and invent the wheel with every project. That reduces coding requirements and maintenance. Programmers can then focus on unique projects and core applications, rather than common stuff, which leads us to…

Make Programming Fun

Programmers think programming is fun. That’s why they do it into the wee hours. There’s something about taking nothing and turning it into real processes that make life ultimately better. So, should they focus on stuff they did last time (for example, building another reporting component) or should they spend their energy on new challenges? Platform-as-a-Service frees programmers from such monotony and gives them more time to spend on other challenges.

Everything is Connected

PaaS puts a lot of focus on foundation building and as a result, when a programmer creates some model or process in PaaS, it has serious reuse potency. Programmers can leave their mark on a core piece of the pie that becomes the norm through all applications that come afterwords.

Empower Them

With PaaS, the status of the programmer is ultimately elevated. Why? Primarily because a lot of common lifting is being done at the IDE levels where business people are essentially mapping out their own data and processes, the programmer is called in when serious effort is required. Maybe it’s a JavaScript or a creation of a class element or a SOAP connector, but PaaS lets programmers go beyond the minutiae of daily business processes and solve the key technical problems.

Reduce Deployment Lag

Most PaaS instances are live. There’s a beauty to that in being able to build, test, and deploy in the same day rather than having to go through big deployment efforts. (You still can have a formal release process if your PaaS supports multiple instances). For a programmer, that means their work is happening in lock step at times with requests that are being made. Technology is no longer the gating item, and instead the overall business approach becomes what needs to get worked out.

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, manage programmers, PaaS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The complete article is available on the ChannelWeb site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To vote, click here.

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

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

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

The Emergence of the Private Cloud

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

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

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

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

A Multi-tenancy Platform for ISVs and Service Providers

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

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

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

LongJump’s Proven Platform Removes Hurdles and Delivers Full Control

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

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

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

Pricing and Availability

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

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

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

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

More Interface Changes

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

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

Field History Logging

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

Applying Formulas to Report Summaries

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

Wildcard Searching

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

Public and Private Tagging

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

Static Resources

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

Mass Data Operations

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

Exporting Attachments

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

Other Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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