LongJump was awarded it’s 2nd AlwaysOn OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies award in a row. LongJump was featured in the Cloud Applications Platform category for its online database and platform-as-a-service (paas) solutions along with nine other vendors. According to the site:

Inclusion in the OnDemand 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. LongJump was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

The OnDemand 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders.  The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2011 list.

Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn, also added:

As the digital information created by businesses continues to explode at astronomical rates, the need to store, manage, socialize, and share this information is becoming extremely challenging. By providing innovative technologies that help enterprises better compete in this new era of information complexity and move their data out into the cloud, the OnDemand 100 represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the private company marketplace.

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya responded:

We are proud for our team’s inclusion in this year’s Top 100. To be named with such great game-changers is an honor and shows that private small businesses are still the great innovators today.

Technorati Tags: alwayson, cloud computing, saas, software-as-a-service

The strength of multi-tenancy is that each of its multitude of individual tenants keeps it constantly evolving. This is in direct contrast to single tenancy, the whole point of which is to limit evolution only to those changes that are perceived to directly benefit the individual tenant. Thus single tenancy misses out on innovations and other advances that are being adopted by competitors, partners and third-party services.

He makes a great case especially in the collaborative aspects of the cloud. But not all multi-tenant architectures are the same.

One reason why single-tenancies still exist is that they are inherently more open to a wide range of users and they can all operate under a single configuration. This is ideal for collaboration. But that can be taken to its own limitations especially in regards to security, specialized processes and workflows, and unique information management.

As we see more business apps evolving into more social components, cloud application platforms are going to need to not only be multi-tenant, but also feature community tenancies.

You still want to maintain segmentation between companies (i.e. tenancies), but you also want to be able to leverage the greater user community as a whole.

Let’s take the federal government as an example. They might have a private cloud in which each department has their own focused tenant. This lets them keep their apps specialized for their own tasks, while also leverages a common architecture and any core apps. But they would also benefit from a bit of cross pollination. Exchanging ideas, working with partners, even internal workforce crowdsourcing. A community tenancy with those kind of applications in mind would be necessary.

So rather than use yet another platform for community apps, your cloud app platform should be ready to support both multi-tenant as well as community tenancies.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, multitenancy, private cloud, saas, software-as-a-service

Recognized for creating new opportunities in cloud computing and SaaS

SUNNYVALE, CA, April 16, 2010 — LongJump, a leading provider of software that powers Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnDemand Top 100 winners. Inclusion in the OnDemand 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. LongJump was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

View the complete release here.

Technorati Tags: alwayson, cloud computing, PaaS, saas, software-as-a-service

Many thanks to Adam Day, VP of Business Development at HRAnswerlink for his participation on describing how his firm was able to leverage LongJump’s on-premise PaaS to drive rapid deployment of their new SaaS offerings.

This follows past eSeminars including:

• Cloud Computing, SaaS and Its Impact on Channel Solution Providers

• New Strategies For Building Business Applications In 2010

If you’d like to view this eSeminar and any in the past that cover SaaS, PaaS and Cloud Computing, you can click here for recorded archives.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, enterprise, enterprise applications, isv, IT department, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

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

James Maguire over at Datamation listed his seven top cloud computing acquisition targets: companies that are “desirable choices” for the “giants” of the industry. Among his targets, Maguire includes IaaS provider GoGrid, cloud enabler Enomaly, storage service provider Vaultscape, cloud manager RightScale, virtualization appliance provider AppZero, application manager Elastra, and our very own application platform LongJump.

It’s an interesting “fantasy league” piece and we find it more flattering than serious about being a target. After all, it is nice to be desired or at least desirable.

And he offers on one of the more concise descriptions of LongJump we’ve seen in awhile:

Among other uses, Longjump is leveraged by developers who want to bring to market an extensive multi-tenant application, without building their own platform. (Think, for instance, of the way that Salesforce’s Force.com offers a development platform.) So ISVs and other service providers can use Longjump to sell SaaS offerings.

In other words, Longjump is a Platform-as-a-Server (PaaS) provider. Or, more accurately – warning, here comes deep jargon – it’s an APaaS, an application-platform-as-a-service play. This is because the Longjump solution offers a virtualized application development platform.

While there is nothing wrong with a bigger company using over the right technology to make a mass push, there isn’t that much acquisition activity lately in the cloud space that we’ve seen. Part of the reason may be that many of the larger players are looking at the entire cloud market, and will likely play in the traditional parts of cloud computing first. The first acquisitions will likely be in the infrastructure based virtualization and management solutions or point solutions that fill a gap, then the platforms. But because a platform like LongJump has such broad appeal with ISVs and enterprises alike, we have just as strong a chance at making an impact through partnerships and deals as we would through being acquired.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, datamation, isv, james maguire, multitenancy, PaaS, saas, software-as-a-service

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya was in San Francisco last week for a video shoot. We won’t go into details about what we were shooting, but we do think the video will go a long way to articulating our vision and value proposition for the LongJump platform.

We feel like our product is starting to take off. Besides being named a Cool Vendor from Gartner, many doors have opened in the recent months and it is clear that the LongJump platform’s ability to quickly enable companies to build their SaaS application business has a real, recognized value. There also seems to be a real trend for companies who have made a point to start building applications on the cloud, don’t want to go rebuild from scratch. Everyone we talk to lately seems to see that LongJump changes the development cycle with a multitenant application platform that enables faster application creating, less wheel reinvention, and greater control over applications deployed to your customers.

The video will be available some time in August. Look for it!

Technorati Tags: cloud, enterprise applications, pankaj malviya, saas, software-as-a-service

The recording from last week’s webinar on Developing and Deploying SaaS Applications featuring MySQL and SIMCO Electronics is now available. The webinar discussed many aspects of building a SaaS business including how to get to market faster without significantly adding a lot of investment and resources. It also discussed many aspects of readying SaaS applications in the public cloud as well as on-premise and private clouds.

The webinar covers the complete application lifecycle for a SaaS deployment including:

• Data Modeling and Application Development
• Test and Release Processes
• Deployment into Public and Private Clouds
• Publishing and Version Management
• Partner Enablement and Ecosystem Building
• Platform and Application Upgrades
• Establishing Application Portability
• Billing and Tenant Support

To view the webinar, go to http://longjump.com/mysql. If you are not a MySQL registered user, you will have to sign up to view the recording.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, multitenancy, mysql, saas, simco, software-as-a-service, sun mic, sun microsystems, webinar

Yesterday featured a nice article from Chad Berndtson of Computer Reseller News on their ChannelWeb blog about LongJump’s BAP. Chad spoke with company Chairman Rick McEachern about the impedous for the platform and the growing need for software producers to want to privately build, brand, deliver and control SaaS applications.

“We thought midsize ISVs between $40 million and $200 million would be the sweet spot,” (McEachern) said. “But we find ISVs whose companies are well over $1 billion coming to us, too. It’s very interesting that it spans the very small to the very large. What they’re saying to us is: ‘Basically, what you’re telling me is you’ve got Salesforce in a box and we can private label it?’ Well, that’s not really our message, but essentially, yes, it’s that. It’s OK with us if you want to put it in those terms.”

The complete article is available on the ChannelWeb site.

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, isv, on-premise, saas, software-as-a-service

SaaS Vendor Converts Offering to Packaged Software
“After finding that numerous enterprises are not comfortable running applications outside their firewalls, one longtime SaaS vendor is converting to an on-premise model. “

Jeffrey Kaplan at Seeking Alpha writes…

Proliferation of SaaS and Cloud Platform Players Continues
“This new ‘portability’ is in response to the growing demands among enterprises to house their SaaS apps behind the firewall. It is also another example of the rapid technological advancements in the SaaS/cloud computing industry which increasingly permits this new form of ‘hybrid’ solution to occur.”

Technorati Tags: cio, on-premise, saas, software-as-a-service

From ComputerWorld’s Mark Everett Hall (which includes an interview with LongJump customer NES’s CTO Izak Joubert)…

Get cloud tools, but forget the cloud
“(Joubert) wanted an application platform that let him quickly create new services without having to update complex database schemas. Joubert evaluated Force.com, App Engine and other cloud services, but settled on LongJump… According to Joubert, LongJump cuts out all of the “building block” work in app dev for his team. As a result, his current development project, which would have taken 18 months using .NET, will be wrapped up after three and half months.”

From CNet’s Charles Cooper…

LongJump to foster private clouds for corporate IT
“Private clouds… typically offer stronger security and reliability and are thought to have special appeal to IT managers keen on keeping their use restricted to company employees. LongJump, which sells an on demand enterprise applications platform, is licensing technology that will let IT managers build apps on a cloud platform as a service and keep local control of their data.”

From ZDNet’s Phil Wainwright…

LongJump puts PaaS on-premise
“In a move that will horrify purists but bring a smile to the face of many conventional ISVs desperate to launch SaaS offerings of their own, platform-as-a-service provider LongJump is today making its platform available as customer-installable licensed software… In my view, LongJump’s hybrid offering plugs a gaping hole in the market today, both for ISVs and for enterprises. No conventional software vendor offers a fully equivalent hosted PaaS alternative to its on-premise platform.”

From InfoWorld’s Tom Sullivan…

LongJump Puts SaaS Inside IT Shops
“By installing the software in-house, IT shops can take control of otherwise hosted functions, such as multi-tenancy, application delivery, and portability… Likewise, ISVs and SaaS providers can use LongJump’s Business Applications Platform to add more features and capabilities to existing services.”

From Paul Miller of The Cloud of Data…

LongJump embraces private Clouds with new licensing model for Business Application Platform
“Business users are able to take a degree of control over their own application needs, whilst reassuring the CIO and IT Team that everything is running on top of a single set of secure infrastructure over which they have control.”

From Markus Klems of Cloudy Times…

Control the Cloud: Licensing LongJump
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.

Technorati Tags: charles cooper, cloud computing, cnet, computerworld, infoworld, mark everett hall, paul miller, phil wainwright, saas, software-as-a-service, tom sullivan, zdnet

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

Among the topics they discussed were LongJump’s bootstrapped roots, the software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) industry, cloud computing as a whole impact on enterprises and businesses.

To listen to the complete interview, along with Steve’s interviews with Court Cunningham, the CEO of Yodle and Daren Tsui from MSPOT, click here.

Technorati Tags: bootstrapping, cloud computing, innovators radio, PaaS, pankaj malviya, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

Software vendors throw around the term “enterprise” quite a bit, and while LongJump is no different, for us, the term has a real meaning. For our applications (everything from our CRM solutions to our Employee Manager) and our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), LongJump truly supports the notion of an enterprise: a business or organization that features multiple departments.

This is critical to understanding the depth of our platform, including our built-in team and role permission management system that offers enterprise-grade security to our highly extensible application interface. Our business model was built with enterprises of all sizes in mind. From the 10- to 20-person startup to the 20,000 Fortune 500 company, we’ve tried to maintain a critical balance between functionality and affordability because in the end, both spectrums have a thirst for both. The small company is going to need powerful tools if it hopes to grow and a Fortune 500 company is going to mature, deep functionality at an economy-of-scale to support all their constituents.

Obviously SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and PaaS solutions provide that immediate time-to-value. You’re up and running on a complete platform and application space literally in seconds. Your team just logs in and is ready to start working. But certainly there are concerns, as indicated by J. David Lashar in The Hidden Cost of SaaS. Lashar states:

The relatively limited scope for configuring or customizing a SaaS initiative makes for low-cost, fast-paced implementation. However, this limited scope and implementation may not support the requirements, may not include the automations, and may not generate the intelligence (i.e., reports and dashboards) that are critical to the business. In other words, SaaS may actually impede the ability to realize full entitlement to CRM value. The cost is not a direct cost, but rather an opportunity cost in terms of lost CRM benefits, at least for enterprise-scale organizations that can afford on-premise solutions and might therefore be able to achieve greater CRM benefits from the greater functionality available from those solutions.

Certainly it is true that many SaaS CRM providers (and even on-premise CRM providers) have a limited scope in their ability to draw from enterprise sources and connect to the entirety of operations within a business. One reason is that those tools are often left to only certain members of the team. Others have to fend for themselves because of the cost of adding them as users. That’s why a platform strategy is critical, because platforms are extensible and designed to connect multiple applications and multiple departments. The economy of scale allows for a greater reach across the entire enterprise.

For example, LongJump’s SOAP Web Services API provides a direct connection point to a variety of web systems and is key to understanding how even on-demand applications contribute to the enterprise. Many SOA initiatives are locked into exchanging information across certain systems. Rarely do end-users see the benefit to help streamline their processes or analysis.

At LongJump we really believe that if you’re going to implement a PaaS solution, and you expect it to be wide-ranging enough within your multi-departmental enterprise, it needs to be truly affordable today as well as tomorrow.

This means supporting a complete enterprise view for everyone in the organization, not just a priviledged few.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, enterprise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, soa, software-as-a-service

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya wrote an article on the “Seven Key Requirements Corporate IT Needs from PaaS” for TechCrunchIT and it was featured today.

In it, Pankaj discusses how cloud computing initiatives are gaining momentum with businesses of all sizes, particularly with enterprises that are looking to adopt the right solutions to address their ongoing business and IT challenges. He also discussed the broad range of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise business and IT units are examining more thoroughly as a direct evolution of SaaS-based, single-discipline solutions that are targeted toward the horizontal enterprise.

These seven requirements for PaaS are what we have been hearing from LongJump customers when they are evaluating the right solution. Specifically, enterprise IT departments that PaaS will surely impact.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, enterprise, PaaS, pankaj malviya, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service, techcrunch

This makes yet another case for SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions. Many organizations are under the false belief that traditional, on-premise systems are safer and more reliable than leveraged enterprise software that is offered on-demand. In the case with Childs, his IT terrorism is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars. However, if San Francisco’s data were hosted, a simple call to the application provider (with proof of administrative creditials) could have restored access in minutes, as well as lock-out Childs from any future access. Hosted software providers are like an additional safety firewall for businesses.

Most SaaS providers like LongJump operate on fully-monitored, secured backends. Data is mirrored, backed up on a daily basis, and an entire operational workflow is engaged before critical changes are made. In addition, people with access to sensitive systems are screened and no one has “exclusive rights.” A third party SaaS provider can quickly correct these types of catastrophes (which thankfully are rare, but always possible) and save organizations like the City of San Francisco the cost and embarassment of a renegade IT terrorist.

Technorati Tags: hosted software, IT administration, on-demand, on-premise, saas, San Francisco, software-as-a-service, Terry Childs