But there is clear trend towards SaaS and the Public Cloud, especially when businesses require higher productivity for less investment as we move to all things digital and accessible.

From where LongJump sits, we do see Private Clouds still being necessary. That’s why we do have an option for ISVs and partner businesses to fully install our entire platform and host it themselves. There is just some information you can’t put into distribution that even hint at a security compromise, whether it is sensitive financial information, intellectual property, health records, or legal information.

Obviously the attraction of Public Cloud solutions is clear:

• No IT commitment or investment
• Highly scalable and encourages growth
• Recurring revenue
• Remote management

In the end, the question for VARs, MSPs, and solution providers is: “What will my customers be willing to do to save some serious money?”

If you have both, find a partner who can do both.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crn, hosted software, isv, msp, private cloud, public cloud, saas, var

PaaS allows application developers to simply build applications in the cloud, without ever having to worry about hardware acquisition and configuration, software installation, configuration, and maintenance, scalability, availability, backups, recovery, etc. You just sign up and start building, deploy with the push of a button, and pay for your usage as you go.

Bobrowski suggests that enterprises have a real option for cloud computing as some PaaS vendors start offering licensed versions of their platform. He urges enterprises keep their eyes “on the emerging trend of new PaaS and IaaS technologies that are available for licensing within your own data center as you consider how you might transition applications from inside your data center to the cloud.”

He also met with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to get some perspective about how our customers are using our installable business applications platform to develop applications faster.

“We are not exclusively a cloud vendor and PaaS on-demand is just one vehicle for our customers to derive value from the LongJump platform,” LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya told us. “In fact, our customers take a movable application approach so they can develop on one instance (our PaaS, for example), test on another (a LongJump instance on Amazon EC2), and publish on yet another (LongJump in a private hosting environment). Our real value is helping to streamline application development and delivery and being agnostic to the application infrastructure. With more private cloud options entering the market, there is also less risk for businesses because they still don’t have to outlay any hardware to develop and test their applications.”

For the complete piece, click here.

Technorati Tags: amazon ec2, cloud computing, enterprise applications, iaas, on-premise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud

Pankaj Malviya Examines How Enterprises and ISVs Can Capitalize on Private Clouds for Their SaaS Applications

LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump, will be speaking on emerging cloud computing options for business at IDG CloudWorld™ in a session titled, “Salvation in the Private Cloud: Platforms at Your Service.” The session will be held on Wednesday, August 12, from 3:00 -3:45 p.m. at IDG’s CloudWorld conference held at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

Malviya will examine the growing trend and appeal of “private clouds,” and looks at the advantages of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution used to develop and deliver web-based applications internally within the company’s own servers and behind its own firewall or on another preferred IaaS environment, such as Amazon EC2. For ISVs, private clouds and PaaS position them to offer new business models from a multi-tenant platform that lets them create SaaS applications faster and reduce development costs.

Forrester estimates the PaaS market will grow over eight years to $15.2 billion.  And Gartner predicts the future of corporate IT is in private clouds.  Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Thomas Bittman recently advocated that embracing private clouds not only enables corporate IT the benefits of clouds within the enterprise, but also the flexibility to use public cloud computing services as soon as they mature.

“The flexibility and utility of cloud computing won’t be leveraged by businesses until security and control is addressed. LongJump is one of the only proven PaaS providers that is successfully meeting the needs of enterprises and ISVs by enabling the development of world class SaaS applications within the public and private clouds,” noted Pankaj Malviya.

Malviya is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years experience in enterprise software design, development, and implementation for Fortune 500 companies. In 2006, Malviya founded LongJump as an early cloud player that maintains the position of giving companies control of where their applications are hosted. Some industry experts have noted that LongJump’s highly portable approach is aimed at delivering the “Holy Grail” of cloud computing and even calling the platform “Force.com in a box.”  Notably, Gartner recently named LongJump as the only cloud application platform to earn its “Cool Vendor” designation.

CloudWorld will provide a comprehensive look at this emerging technology that is becoming increasingly important to the enterprise for its cost savings, scalability and agile functionality. For more information on the conference, interested parties can visit: www.cloudworldexpo.com.

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 400 enterprise companies. LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and catalog of highly customizable, business applications help companies reduce 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.

About IDG World Expo
IDG World Expo (www.idgworldexpo.com) is a leading producer of tradeshows and events for professionals and consumers seeking world-class education, strategic business relationships, and access to industry-leading products and services. IDG World Expo’s portfolio of conferences and events includes Macworld®, Electronic Entertainment Expo® (E3 Expo®), Next Generation Data Center™ (NGDC™), OpenSource World™, and CloudWorld™. IDG World Expo is a business unit of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research and event company.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, forrester, gartner, isv, on-premise, PaaS, pl, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud

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

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