SEAL Mobile and Mash-up Micro-Apps are lightweight enterprise applications providing a secure access to on-premise and/or cloud enterprise applications via simple interfaces for common tasks. These are available across various business domains from Supply-Chain, Logistics, Procurement and Manufacturing to Financials, HR, CRM and Performance management.

Their Micro-Apps are delivered to mobile platforms like the Blackberry, iPhone and Google Android.

You can visit them at SAPPHIRE in Orlando, booth #721 for a demo.

If you want to learn how they were able to get to market so fast, you can attend our next Ziff Davis Enterprise eSeminar May 26 at 1PM Eastern.

Technorati Tags: android, blackberry, cloud computing, custom applications, erp, iphone, isv, PaaS, saas, sap, sapphire

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

You can watch the short 6-minute video here.

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

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

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

You can read the complete press release here.

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

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

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