crm-longjumpSunnyvale, CA, Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider LongJump today demonstrated their belief in the value of so-called ‘private Clouds’ by licensing their existing Business Application Platform both for local installation inside the enterprise and for re-branding by third party hosting providers. I spoke with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya ahead of their announcement.

The company was founded in 2003, and is currently profitable with some thirty employees, no debt and no external financing.

According to Malviya, the team set out to create a multi-tenant Platform optimised for the easy creation of web-based applications, but their first public offering was a SaaS CRM application devoted to the media industry. That application is still running today, and is used by more than 150 enterprise customers.

The Platform followed in September 2007, exclusively as a hosted offering from LongJump’s partner data centres, and Malviya perceives it as in direct competition to Salesforce.com’s Force.com. With extensive support for common protocols and communications specifications such as REST, SOAP, Java and XML, and a common security framework throughout, Malviya argues that an application Platform such as the one his company offers is important in overcoming what he describes as the

“Enterprise tendency to develop one-off apps… and then expect IT to support them.”

He argues that 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.

Today, that same Platform is being made available on an annual subscription basis for local installation behind the firewall, as well as being offered to a range of third party hosting companies whom Malviya hopes will brand and resell the software to their own customers. According to Malviya, two (unnamed) service providers have already agreed to resell the Platform, and details will no doubt be forthcoming as they get up to speed.

As the LongJump corporate site notes,

“LongJump BAP for Enterprises addresses a major gap in next generation application platforms designed solely for the public web. Information that is sensitive or subject to regulatory issues is relegated to sitting on a custom application built internally, adding to a level of complexity and management that neither scales nor adapts well with changing requirements. Because LongJump BAP for Enterprises sits inside your own datacenter, its applications and platform are ideal for organizations tasked with managing [sensitive] information”

And, crucially,

“In addition, applications can be packaged for migration from one LongJump deployed instance to another. For example, development can take place in a cloud deployment and be deployed in production in a corporation’s data center.”

This will, of course, be crucial in allowing flexible movement between different environments as requirements, capacity and resources change.

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