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.