Steven Burke of ChannelWeb summarized the major topic at this year’s XChange Tech Innovators conference in Las Vegas. Can you guess? Cloud. Specifically how can the solution provider channel leverage the Cloud as part of their suite of product and service offerings.

Says Burke:

“It’s not too early to call 2010 as the year of the cloud for the channel. Solution providers, from the smallest to the biggest players, were getting their hands around the cloud and planning their 2010 cloud sales strategy.”

With more and more solution providers, VARs and MSPs seeing a compression of their revenue and margins, the Cloud can seem like an additional threat because the first instinct is to associate the Cloud with purely virtualization of services with no delivery or implementation requirements. They might be true for some services that are fairly turnkey like email hosting or antivirus, but for other applications, particularly verticalized applications or departmental management applications like CRM or HR, there is a wealth of possibility in providing implementation, process consulting, etc. And some vendors, like LongJump, even offer the ability to whitelabel a SaaS application (or the entire multitenant platform), allow VAR/MSP partners to state their own pricing, resell prove applications, and maintain the relationship with the customer rather than hand it over to a vendor.

Burke also mentions that LongJump won the Most Innovative Technology award at the event for its ability to enable solution providers to deliver SaaS solutions to their customers.

Technorati Tags: channelweb, cloud computing, crn, everythingchannel, msp, saas, Sales and CRM, steven burke, var, xchange

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

SaaS solutions have been around for going on 10 years now and the time is right to see broader and deeper adoption of this approach to application development and utilization. Lower risk processes like sales, marketing and HR have provided the first set of users to benefit from shorter implementation times, easier to use applications and functionality that is perpetually kept up to date. Now that enterprises are faced with doing even more with even less, SaaS should be considered as a replacement more mission-critical internal business processes as well as customer facing applications. By all means grieve, but know that SaaS has been waiting patiently for you since the day you first met. She’s grown as platform and so have your needs.

The traditional technology adoption cycle has just received a jarring inflection point kick in the pants. Typically new technologies move through a predictable path from early adopters to market laggards the same way almost every other commodity introduced into the marketplace. It is a challenging cycle that many technologies fail to overcome (does anyone remember bubble memory and hand-held scanners?) but fairly predictable none the less. According to Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm, each stage along the way requires certain strategies and tactics that increase the likelihood of success.

Assessing the Grieving Process

The last few months have dramatically changed the landscape globally and everyone will be looking at everything they do from a different perspective. We are just now getting out of the denial phase of dealing with this crisis and heading smack into anger over how this all happened and happened so quickly. If this path is continued, bargaining will ensue and that means evaluating what can be done differently to survive in the new economic reality. From an organizational perspective that means looking at every cost associated with everything to see if it can be done away with or done more cheaply in another way (saas starts looking better for a broader role in the business.)

Without this shock to the system the status quo would have been maintained because there would not have been a compelling reason to change what was already in place. Companies do not experience depression, the next phase of coping with a tragic event, even though the people that make up an organization can and often do experience it quite profoundly.

So that leaves acceptance of the fact that a bad thing has happened and the only choice is to adapt or die. Since death of an organization means serious economic disruption to all concerned, adapting to leaner and flexible processes is the only viable choice. These types of changes are always talked about in an organization but ultimately there is little motivation to go through painful change when everyone feels like the ship is generally going in the right direction.

While SaaS and cloud computing are not a panacea, it does offer organizations the ability to get in, get up and get running more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional software applications. While the TCO debate continues over whether saas is cheaper with larger user populations over a long period of time, there is one major component that is overlooked when calculating the benefits of saas. Continuous upgrading of a SaaS platform means a company never has to go through an upgrade or deal with the incompatibilities so-called suite product offerings.

The reality of SAP and Oracle’s products is they are a mixture of legacy code bases from the companies they purchased over the years. So adding a configurator to your CRM system means a whole new implementation with business disruption and resource drain to do the implementation. Further, if the configurator gets an upgrade there is no guarantee that it will work with your existing versions of opportunity management and demand planning. This is why so many companies are running customer support systems that are 2 years past the last upgrade and in numerous cases outside standard support from the vendor. It’s also why SOA has become a mantra in many IT circles.

The Time to Move On

Today everything must be reevaluated with more and more organizations looking at their legacy systems and transitioning them to the cloud. They will be able to do it more quickly with less money and maintain the applications with fewer people. In addition they will be able to react more quickly to changing market requirements and even globalize operations to take advantage of lower labor costs or access to new market opportunities. It is time to realize that building a SAS 70 II compliant data center is better left to those who do that sort of thing for a living. Likewise, it is time to acknowledge that the lower levels of the software stack have commoditized to a point where there should be little or no need for a staff of database architects and programmers, no matter where their located, hammering endlessly at an attempt to hone the perfect application to keep the business running. Situational, composite applications that adhere to enterprise conditions and dynamics and are turned around in days rather than months are the new new things.

2009 will be a watershed year for SaaS because the cost of maintaining the status quo is no longer sustainable in the face of seismic economic changes. The organizations that will survive, or even thrive, going forward are the ones whose systems don’t prevent them from making the necessary changes to their business model or operating practices. All the talk of building an agile enterprise will be put to the test this year and cloud offerings will be one of the key enabling technologies that will increase the likelihood of success.

There is life after traditional legacy applications in the enterprise and it’s time for both you and SaaS to go forward together into this new life.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crossing the chasm, database, geoffrey moore, IT department, IT projects, IT silos, legacy applications, saas, Sales and CRM, soa, software-as-a-service

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

Company Appoints Vice President of Business Development to Lead Newly Unveiled Partner Program and Drive Channel Strategy

Sunnyvale, CA May 19, 2008 — LongJump, a platform for highly customizable, interconnected on-demand business applications, announced today that it has appointed Jay Noble as its new Vice President of Business Development. Noble brings with him more than 20 years of enterprise-level consulting and implementation experience as well as a solid track record of sales and marketing successes, overseeing CRM-focused project implementations and teams. In his new role, Noble will spearhead the company’s sales and partner channel strategy.

Noble’s appointment follows closely on LongJump’s recently unveiled Jumpstart Partner Program, which was developed for resellers who want to leverage a true enterprise-grade, multi-tenant, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and deliver database-driven custom applications that meet their customers’ needs. The program provides partners with an exceptionally attractive incremental revenue channel where they can monetize LongJump’s application platform with their own premium services, while benefiting from LongJump’s support of lead generation campaigns, business opportunity referrals, and generous multi-year commission plans.

“Until now, there has not been a SaaS provider that has developed a compelling channel proposition for partners, which is absolutely essential to bring SaaS to more businesses,” noted LongJump’s founder and CEO, Pankaj Malviya. “Jay’s experience and success on the reseller side provides LongJump with an important perspective into what the VAR and developer partners need from SaaS vendors to expand their revenue opportunities.”

Noble has a wealth of knowledge in sales, marketing, and customer support, and has led numerous implementations of enterprise CRM software at global companies, including Apple, Sybase and Hawaiian Telecom. Prior to joining LongJump, Noble served as President of North American Operations for saaspoint, a leading Salesforce.com implementation partner, where he helped deliver several major projects at Fortune 1,000 companies. Previously, Noble spent four years as a top senior manager and CRM practice leader at BearingPoint. In this role, Noble spearheaded several multi-million dollar systems integration projects within Fortune 500 companies and was a key member of the PeopleSoft and Salesforce.com alliance teams.

“LongJump’s on-demand platform is trailblazing how enterprises of all sizes can collaborate, manage information, and simplify business process optimization,” stated Noble. “The LongJump team demonstrates a focus and commitment to truly help our channel partners maximize their revenue potential with LongJump’s suite of interconnected applications.”

Noble holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management from Oral Roberts University. He currently resides in San Jose, California.

Technorati Tags: customer relationship management, on-demand, PaaS, saas, Sales and CRM

Recently, there was a news report on how a lot of families are dealing with the (possible) recession by growing their own fruits and vegetables. Makes perfect sense. It cuts down on expensive gas, its self-replenishing, and you can grow what you need. It also is tasty and satisifying. What’s the point?

There is a term in sales called “low-hanging fruit,” identifying prospects and customers that you can capture and sell to quickly without a lot of background work or negotiation. In sales, being able to identify which businesses are due for some type of re-marketing or outreach, can reduce the chances of existing easy revenue slipping through the cracks. Its easier to sell repeat business than it is to start from scratch.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a restaurateur and you keep contact with your frequent patrons that come to your restaurant. CRM Solutions like LongJump’s Sales Force Automation suite would enable you to pull data from your cash registers and let you analyze across both data sets when one of your regulars hasn’t paid a visit in a few weeks.

How can you use this valuable customer information? Add an email marketing campaign with LongJump Campaign Manager to repeat each week for all your missing regulars with a “we miss you” type message, a coupon for something unique like a free bottle of house wine with dinner for two, and a tantalizing list of new menu items.

If they come, again push that register data back into LongJump, and send that customer a thank you, with the same offer that they can pass along to one of their friends.

You’ve now created a low-cost, self-replenishing, referral-driven campaign.

Technorati Tags: customer relationship management, on-demand, saas, Sales and CRM