When Salesforce rolled out its software development platform, Force.com, last year, we called it a “game ender” for several other startups helping people create and deploy applications as web services.
Among these was LongJump, which has enabled businesses and individuals to create web applications using visual tools since early summer 2007. Today, LongJump strikes back at Force.com by adding a coding environment to its own suite of developer tools.
More technically skilled users can now create Java applications for LongJump using a special Eclipse IDE plugin or in-browser editor. The company is touting its platform as more standards-base than Force.com, which requires developers to use the proprietary Apex Code language, or Bungee, another platform-as-a-service provider (that incidentally appears to have hit a rough spot as of late).
LongJump will provide a sandbox area for developers to test their Java applications before deploying them into production. The platform also implements a reusable relational data object model that’s intended to save you time recoding when developing several applications.
Founder Pakaj Malviya claims the company is focused on providing developer tools for IT departments in particular, whereas Coghead targets SMBs and Bungee appeals to serious developers. Whether any of these startups can compete successfully against Salesforce, however, will have to be seen as the market matures.
Longjump was recently on WorkFast.TV here: http://www.fast...ovider-longjump which gives you some more details about what they are doing.
I had a chance to check out Bungee at the Web 2.0 Expo and thought it looked very useful. I’m not sure how the market is divided by all the PaaS providers, but Bungee certainly seemed good for the recreational and professional markets. Knowing SalesForce/Force.com, they’d still be going after the SMB and enterprise markets. So, I think there’s room for some of the players out there. Overall, I think the PaaS industry will become very interesting in a year.
JP
http://www.convos.com
We played around with the offerings from bungee and LongJump before deciding to stick with the force. I think both offerings are innovative and provides great tools to develop PaaS apps (and gives you lots more flexibility then force), but IMO one of the less talked about issues for PaaS developers is not the ease of development rather its the ease of the go-to market – in order words, how the PaaS vendor can support your marketing, credibility and provides a brand that you can leverage. At the end of the day, when you tell your customers and partners that your app is built and hosted @ force.com, they know who is behind it and what level of SLA they can deliver.
Doron
Yes, if your customers are Salesforce.com users. But let’s not forget it’s a limitation as well, taking into account force.com users don’t cover the whole audience out there. And LongJump is developed for programmer utilization.
I would consider of more challenge here such vendors like Coghead or TeamDesk.net, not LongJump, as long as they provide solutions for non-techie users, thus being more in demand.
From your post, LongJump seems quite promising. Its new feature, Eclipse IDE, is really a great feature. But I agree with your concluding statement that we have to give some time to it to see whether it will be able to create an impact or not.
SalesForce needs to tighten up their game on the “WANTED Analytics” window loading so slow and do a better job pre-populating their phone number, e-mail address and other contact information fields a little more on the “lead” page (The orange page). I find that I have to do more searching in Google to find companies phone numbers and website addresses when I am using SalesForce, which is a pain in the @$$, cause when I go thru the leads, I automatically thought that all of them would already have all the contact info provided either by the SalesForce bot or Wanted analytics crawler, when they crawl across the web…
Pls, could anyone explain to me if Paas supports Saas approach, in other words, building an app on top of Force, Longjump or Coghead, would I be able to support a multi-tenant arquitecture, providing service to thousands or millions of end-users?
Rato,
Yes, Coghead PaaS does support SaaS. As a Coghead solution provider you could be a multi-tenant SaaS provider to millions of end-users.
Can we please keep Scoble out of here? We don’t know who is paying him to say what.
interesting tool
With salesforce you can only create applications that exist inside their CRM product. Force.com isn’t a competitor to Longjump, AWS, etc.
@Bill Appleton says “… With salesforce you can only create applications that exist inside their CRM product…”. Is this true?, if I built something with Force.com only salesforce.com users will be able to use my app?.
Yes.
@TechCrunch Michael, Intuit, Inc. also has a PaaS solution. I wonder if you have looked into it before writing this article and if so, what are the reasons for not listing it?
http://tinyurl.com/5yk5rf
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Oh! That’s Interesting.