Cloud-Based Application Platform and PaaS by LongJump » Platform

Coghead’s PaaSing

dCheng — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:13:08 +0000

It was revealed last night by TechCrunch that one of our platform-as-a-service competitors ran out of funding and is closing its doors. While on one hand it is heartening to see someone in your space, who has done a commendable job helping to bring attention to the space, take such an unfortunate turn, it has also made it even more clear that our approach is the right thing to do.

PaaS is still a game changer, but I really believe that PaaS companies need to have a stabilizer in order to survive. Selling an app platform is a touchy thing. It’s like selling ideas, not some canned product with a few extra options. You don’t walk into a Walmart and pick up an application platform and some milk. That’s because PaaS requires effort on the part of the buyer — an investment of thought, ingenuity and energy at a time when budgets are in the dumper.

If you don’t have a second source of income or a VC sugar daddy who is in it for the long haul, you will see things like this — essentially a failed marriage between funding and business model.

As a competitor, I can truly say that Coghead was a pretty good platform. What they were able to do with public widgets was impressive and their outreach to ISVs definitely filled a market void. But it was starting up as a platform company, not a solution company and any inroad into serious businesses requires real application solutions that capture the power of the platform.

If someone were looking to put their eggs into a platform-as-a-service for a solution, they should take a look at the company itself and make sure it’s viable. Otherwise, yes, there is a risk. Even the heavily touted Salesforce.com has it’s own traditional revenue stream to offset the costs of a PaaS push and their platform is also a risk to lock-in, customer ownership, etc.

We’re proud to say that LongJump has never raised a dime of VC funding, we’re a profitable operation thanks to not firing up all engines all the time, a suitable other line of business in both Relationals and LongJump.com, and we’re making hey with our platform play by listening to customers tell us what they need. And we shall continue to strive by making the platform meet the needs of the businesses it intends to serve, not the other way around.

“Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’”

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

New Features Coming January 25th

dCheng — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:46:47 +0000

The LongJump team will be introducing several new features to be released on January 25th. This release will feature the first ever major update to the LongJump user interface. The new style will be less cluttered, easier to read, load faster, and consolidate many functions on the platform.

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

Jumping into the Cloud

Admin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:23:03 +0000

Robert Scoble of FastCompany.TV talks to LongJump CEO, Pankaj Malviya about a range of topics including what applications moving into the Cloud, i.e. PaaS, mean for IT and about his company.

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud, Longjump, PaaS, Platform, saas, Sales and CRM, Service