Emerging Vendors

May 14, 2009

Company: LongJump

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: LongJump Business Application Platform

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: A handful of ISVs

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Through its new Business Application Platform, LongJump is actively recruiting ISVs for branded SaaS offerings that will get them to market fast and customized.

The Lowdown: LongJump is actually a service of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Relational Networks, which was founded by CEO Pankaj Malviya and Chairman Rick McEachern in 2003. The company's recently launched LongJump Business Application Platform is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that can be licensed for use in an enterprise data center or by ISVs seeking a platform to build and host their own private-label SaaS-based applications.

"The idea was, let's create a framework for creating all kinds of service applications in a multitenant environment," McEachern said.

According to McEachern, he and Malviya had worked together at startups in the past and saw a common theme. McEachern said Relational didn't find too many buyers interested in the cloud and PaaS concepts back in 2003 -- everyone, he said, wanted CRM, so it was with Relational CRM that the company first took off.

LongJump Business Application Platform

"That was a key revenue-generating project for the company for a long time, but at the end of 2006, we decided the time was right to split a platform out as a separate thing," McEachern said, referring to the services piece that became LongJump's PaaS offering. "It was first in the cloud. People could come along and subscribe to it, use our CRM our asset tracker, develop new things. We're not the first to do this, obviously -- Salesforce.com came out with their application exchange -- but then we heard from ISVs what they want to do is host it themselves and have things like pricing control and SLA control."

The attraction to private clouds pushed LongJump to the next phase, McEachern said.

"Really, that led to another discovery, which is, what if we made LongJump available to ISVs to host on their premises. They have the branding control, and they're not giving their customers to any other software providers," he said.

IT departments in enterprise-level businesses are LongJump's other substantial focus, especially those who are converting their data to a private cloud but would rather have their in-house IT department host it themselves. LongJump's PaaS licensing, said McEachern, provides them the tools to do so.

"They were telling us that for CRM, they're comfortable with this stuff in the cloud, but with things like identity theft, there was a lot of data they just weren't willing to hand over," McEachern said. "There are so many projects to do in enterprises and not enough resources."

McEachern said LongJump has been surprised by the size of many of the ISVs that have come forward. The company in the next few months will continue to scale its PaaS offerings; McEachern said ISVs want options, options, options -- from different layouts to more customizable presentation and dashboards.

He suggested what's attracted so many prospective developers to LongJump's stead is how portable the offering is.

"We thought midsize ISVs between $40 million and $200 million would be the sweet spot," he 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."