Come visit us at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo this week in Orlando at Booth 523. We’ll be participating in a Cool Vendor presentation and we will be positioned in a Magic Quadrant for the first time.

Be sure to come by to discuss our new Reseller Partner Program for VARs, MSPs and ISVs and see up and coming features in our next release.

Technorati Tags: gartner, isv, itxpo, msp, var

GARTNER SYMPOSIUM/ITxpo, Orlando, FL, October 19, 2009 – LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced a value added reseller (VAR) program for its LongJump Cloud Applications Platform from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. LongJump’s reseller program appeals to solution providers, Managed Service Providers (MSP), ISVs and VARs who want to take full advantage of opportunities in the Software-as-a-Service market, generate recurring subscription revenues and leverage LongJump as a platform for the delivery of ongoing custom products and new service offerings. LongJump’s program lets VARs leverage its powerful, multi-tenant cloud platform to launch their own branded SaaS business, build custom database-driven applications or customize LongJump’s existing CRM offering to meet their clients’ specific needs.

In the face of adverse market conditions, businesses are holding back on big ticket IT consulting projects, forcing VARs and solution providers to shift strategies and focus on smaller IT projects. Now is the time for resellers, solution providers and MSPs to diversify their customer offerings by offering SaaS solutions. Forrester estimates by 2016 70% of all SaaS business applications will be built on a PaaS platform, and that the PaaS market will grow to more than $15 billion in 8 years. For software vendors considering adopting SaaS in the short-term, Forrester recommends leveraging an existing PaaS offering to mitigate losing more time-to-market.

LongJump’s VAR program allows VARs to profitably create solutions for large and small projects and offer those solutions to clients on a subscription basis. Leveraging the company’s PaaS provides a way for VARs to directly participate in a SaaS business model by facilitating rapid application development to fulfill clients’ long tail of IT projects, while also creating new recurring revenue streams to help their own bottom line.

“The LongJump VAR program is designed to give resellers and solution providers a profitable and fast way to tap into new cloud revenue streams,” stated Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump. “We are providing our reseller partners with ready-to-use applications and a flexible PaaS solution to capitalize on for ongoing customer application opportunities.”

Program Features Keep Partners in the Driver Seat

LongJump’s VAR program provides real financial advantages to resellers by 1) delivering recurring revenue streams, 2) ensuring that they own the entire customer relationship, and 3) providing a platform for the delivery of additional business process consulting and automation. The program includes:

• Your Business, Your Branding: VARs can offer their own branded solutions to their customers.
• No Program Fees: VARs can quickly get started by offering SaaS products to their customers.
• Recurring Revenues: VARs earn recurring revenue based on the pricing they set for their customers. Wholesale service price is NOT a percentage of revenue.
• No Hardware or Software to License: LongJump’s multi-tenant platform is fully hosted, eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and operations costs.
• VAR Customer Control: The reseller will always be the customer’s point of contact. Resellers manage billing and support so that customers are not faced with the hassle of having to deal with different vendors, contracts, etc
• Platform and Product Training: LongJump will provide free training for resellers to certify them on the platform and help them understand how to create and customize client solutions.
• Technical Sales Support: For sales situations where technical expertise can help close a contract, LongJump will work with the reseller as a member of their team to provide answers to customers.
• Sales and Marketing Materials: Partners will be supplied with relevant sales and marketing materials that can be customized, including datasheets, white papers and other documentation about LongJump.

Partners Achieve Success with LongJump

LongJump already counts a number of VARs participating in its program. For example:

• Carlsbad, CA-based Ximix does business with a diverse portfolio of companies in healthcare, military and defense, manufacturing, real estate and financial services and leverages LongJump’s platform having built hundreds of custom applications for HR, billing, employee management, etc. Rob Brown, a Ximix cloud evangelist and consultant, commented, “Good information management is about reducing complexity and PaaS eliminates having to manage a large ecosystem of SaaS vendors. For many organizations, we avoid the cost creep that is associated with more established vendors like Salesforce by developing on LongJump’s PaaS offering, but its real value is its application-agnostic framework which enables delivery of any transactional database-driven application extremely quickly. This means as our clients grow and require changes to their application portfolio, the apps that we prototype and build on LongJump can be extended and reused or translated into new apps on-the-fly — drastically tipping the economy of scale in our favor.”
• Atlanta, GA-based Emery Creek Solutions joined the company’s VAR program to take advantage of customizing its CRM to maximize customer opportunities. “LongJump’s CRM was easy for us to get up and running and customize. It is the most comprehensive CRM product I’ve used,” said Tim Frey, partner at Emery Creek Solutions. “With LongJump, we have been able to integrate our customer information and automate our sales processes, allowing our team to work quickly and more efficiently.”

Pricing and Availability

LongJump delivers enormous value to the channel. LongJump applications and PaaS platform have all the capabilities required for enterprise adoption and is comparable with other PaaS platforms that charge customers from $65 to $200 per user/per month. However, LongJump’s aggressive channel pricing creates a terrific opportunity to channel resellers to start offering branded SaaS solutions to generate recurring revenues.

The LongJump VAR program is available now starting at $15/user/month and includes LongJump’s pre-built and custom applications. Resellers can set the end user pricing.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, forrester, gartner, isv, itxpo, msp, referral, reseller, Sales and CRM, var

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