LongJump today announced that The David Allen Company, renowned experts in personal and organizational productivity, including David Allen’s decade-long bestseller Getting Things Done and the more recent Making It All Work books as well as many public and private coaching session and seminars, has selected LongJump’s Business Applications Platform to manage its business development and resource management operations for the company.

Before we made our selection, we evaluated several 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 platform to address the complex business needs of an entrepreneurial company with global mindshare.  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.
- Robert Peake, CIO of The David Allen Company

You can read the complete press release here.

Technorati Tags: custom applications, david allen, getting things done, gtd, PaaS, situational applications

There’s a new, vendor-neutral site called Power in the Cloud that is completely focused on situational applications: custom applications that are tailored to meet specific business needs. They have a particular interest in the different platforms, like LongJump, that are geared towards situational apps and are having some interesting discussions around some of the advantages and challenges of this emerging space.

The discussions tend to be around how the more advanced business user or analysts can take advantage of these platforms, but they also recognize tools for more hard core developers.

Here’s their coverage of LongJump.

Technorati Tags: enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, situational applications

This is something we’re predicting will coalesce; right now it’s a bunch of individuals doing this on their own, but we expect lean software to catch on… Lean software could be the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications and could be helpful in a down economy.

Rymer describes lean software as:

An approach to building, delivering and running software that values fit-to-purpose, simplicity and time to results above all. Lean approaches minimize complexity, startup time and resource usage, and [avoid] features and methods not essential to fulfilling the application’s business purposes. Developers can easily combine Lean software components with others when large systems require more features.

Rymer is spot on in discussing the need for programmers to build leaner, smaller applications. One thing the Web 2.0 push has taught us was to be more introspective when it comes to our application needs. Do we really need every application to be a monolithic exercise in features and functionality? Probably not. Lean software is also very much akin to situational applications.

At the same time, the platform those applications are built on are extremely important. The platform itself must be rich enough to support agile development models where apps can be deployed at will and common business infrastructure components don’t have to be built up from scratch. It is also important for the platform to allow situational and lean applications to connect to each other natively so you don’t end up creating another application silo.

Rymer also stated seven principles to follow for developing lean software:

1. Use fit-to-purpose tools and platforms
2. Employ a lean and agile development process
3. Follow standards that enable pluggable components for tools and applications
4. Hire skillful developers
5. Leverage open source
6. Optimize deployments
7. Rent or outsource context and own core applications

As Rymer mentions, there are some solutions already in the form of OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service), which provide modular and elastic alternatives to heavy solutions.

Technorati Tags: application development, custom applications, developers, enterprise applications, eweek, forrester, john rymer, lean software, PaaS, situational applications