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

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

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

ORLANDO, FL, GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo CONFERENCE, Monday, October 13, 2008 – LongJump, a leading Application Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, unveiled a new release of its platform with features and functionality aimed specifically to meet requirements of corporate enterprises. LongJump already enables corporate IT to fully implement the LongJump platform, with its built-in application creation, workflow and customization, and data analysis capabilities ? all without the added infrastructure costs or data center overhead. In addition, LongJump’s new release provides sophisticated, actionable trending analysis, email-based workflow interaction, sandboxing for improved management of the testing and deployment process, and mobile access to applications. LongJump will be located at booth #510.

“Until now, Global 2000 organizations have struggled with delivering and maintaining dozens of applications and data silos,” noted Pankaj Malviya, LongJump’s founder and CEO. “The core value of PaaS is to enable companies to create multiple, interconnected applications to serve all of their operational teams on a common, integrated platform. We’re pleased to deliver LongJump’s latest platform release that squarely supports key requirements of our corporate enterprise customers.”

PaaS = SaaS-based Application Development

Resource-taxed enterprises are increasingly moving to take advantage of the ease and flexibility that PaaS and SaaS solutions offer; however, IT still has concerns, and one of the most pressing is around the robustness of these platforms.

A September 2008 Gartner report titled, “Control Personnel Costs to Reduce Your Application Support Budget,” notes the following: “IT Key Metrics Data shows that approximately 38% of the IT budget is directly attributable to applications that support the business operations, including financial management and ERP, corporate performance management (CPM), SCM and CRM applications.”

Enterprise IT requires ways to reduce costs, development time, quality testing, delivering and maintaining application infrastructure, as well as increasing reusability of application components to streamline delivery and support. With Platform-as-a-Service, enterprise IT can build more applications on the same platform, and the economies of scale will take effect to dramatically lowering the costs of all subsequent application initiatives.

Since its inception, LongJump has delivered its enterprise-grade applications platform with a focus on eliminating obstacles that keep established companies from adopting PaaS on a wide-scale basis, such as proprietary scripting, proprietary languages, availability, and reintroducing new information silos.

With its ability to scale quickly, leverage existing data natively across different applications, and extend its platform with industry standard, Java-based tools, LongJump’s platform already addressed many of these enterprise concerns. This new release introduces an additional layer of functionality that enterprises rely on, including greater interoperability, enhancing security, and extending reporting to support audit and compliance requirements.

Key enhancements to LongJump’s new platform include:

• Business Process Automation:
  • Email-based Workflow Approvals: Lets users trigger workflow activities using any email device
• SOA Integration:
  • Compliance of common SOAP-encoding standards such as WSDL / WS-I: Integrates seamlessly
    with other systems or SOAs
• Application Release Process and Compliance:
  • Sandboxing: Enables a company to create a separate instance of LongJump in order to test applications before deploying them into a production environment. This gives enterprises consistent control to test applications in advance of rolling out updates in a more manageable and secure way to support regulatory and business process requirements.
• Mobile Access:
  • Mobile Access: Provides WAP-based wireless access for BlackBerry, iPhone and other webenabled mobile phones and devices
• Security Enhancements:
  • LDAP server integration and authentication: Enables integration into Single Sign-On enterprise environments
  • Additional Security Login Controls: Ensures login identity based on computer MAC addresses and personal security questions
  • Visibility Controls: Supports an added layer of control for certain data fields for securing specific information
• Enhanced Reporting:
  • Historical Data Tracking: Tracks history of data in specific fields for trending and analysis
  • Additional Reporting: Provides improved user reporting and auditing to support compliance
    requirement

The company’s announcement comes on the heels of its LongJump Development Suite announcement for developers eager to exploit SaaS-based application development and delivery.

About LongJump

Based in Sunnyvale, California, LongJump is a service of Relationals Inc., a privately-held, proven provider of on-demand CRM and SFA business applications to more than 150 enterprise companies. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog of highly customizable, business applications help companies reduces the time and cost of developing and delivering data-driven applications. Its business building blocks let developers and corporate IT teams gain significant time-to-value, since they can bypass the need to repeatedly recreate common business processes and functions. LongJump is the first platform-as-a-service provider to bring robust customization, integration, and powerful functionality to businesses of all sizes, enabling them to quickly design, implement and do further customization in an easy, affordable way. For more information, visit www.longjump.com or call 800.886.9028.

Technorati Tags: enterprise, gartner, itxpo, PaaS, Platform-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