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.

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LongJump, a hosted applications environment that competes with the likes of Salesforce and Coghead, is introducing a new visual workflow system meant to streamline business processes.

Companies will be able to set up this workflow system in conjunction with existing LongJump applications, such as those that track businesses’ assets or contracts. Before the introduction of this workflow system, these applications could be used to manage databases of relevant objects. Now they can also be used to program and execute on procedures that regularly occur around them.

Do expense requests usually go through your company’s hierarchy before getting approved? You can now chart this process in LongJump with “states” and “actions”, respectively represented as circles and vectors in the visual workflow creation tool. Each circle represents a type of person within the company (supervisor, manager, CEO, etc) that must make a decision on the expense request (approve, deny, issue check, etc). These decisions cause the request to travel along the vectors until a final conclusion to the process (request fulfilled).

This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various “in” and “out” boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.

LongJump says that its visual workflow solution is the first to come integrated with a full-featured database application suite. Competitors include Appian (a hosted solution) and Tibco Business Studio (non-hosted), but these must be used with something like Oracle or SAP. Since many large corporations are happy with their existing database solutions, this new workflow product will appeal mostly to small and medium-sized businesses.

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Bungee Labs

Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

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Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.

Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.

Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.

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The DaaS service consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing. The tools offer full access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com Platform, unifying development and IT collaboration tools with Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The new service includes a Metadata API, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Sandbox, and Code Share that all developers to build enterprise Software-as-a-Service applications.

The new pricing model includes a pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform and Development-as-a-Service. The model offers a cheaper alternative to companies that may use applications in the cloud less often, in theory making the service more affordable to use. Force.com cloud (per login) has a list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of 5 logins per user per month, and will be offered at $0.99 per login to the end 2008. For more frequent users (more then 5 logins per month) must sign up to Force.com’s unlimited pricing plan of $50 per user per month.

Salesforce.com and Emergence Capital Partners have also announced a new competition, the Force.com $1 Million Challenge – a venture competition for entrepreneurs and companies building on the Force.com platform. Winners will receive a $1 million investment from Emergence Capital as well as space in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Incubator facility for one year. The winner will be announced in November at Dreamforce 2008.

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LongJump, an SaaS offering that enables ordinary people to build and customize database-centric applications (for sales, marketing, IT, HR, finance, etc.), has launched a new offering dubbed “Database-as-a-Service (DaaS)” that allows the more technically literate to build applications with databases in the “cloud” (i.e. stored on LongJump’s servers).

The company is comparing its new offering to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, because both remove the burden of having to maintain servers locally. In LongJump’s own words, DaaS shines by “cutting the costs and easing the hassles for entrepreneurs and developers who would otherwise have to purchase a database server, provision it, address data access and availability issues, manage backup and replication issues, and tackle security and data protection.”

Most of LongJump’s value has hitherto been relevant for the type of people who don’t have the expertise or initiative necessary to develop applications the old fashion way (i.e. actual programming), so it’s interesting to see the company introduce a service intended for precisely the opposite sort of person. The DaaS service can be used either to design applications that use the same data accessed by LongJump applications themselves, or it can be used apart from such applications to deploy wholly disconnected projects.

LongJump, with access to its REST-based API included, costs $24.95 per user per month, or $19.95 per user per month with a 12-month commitment. Competitor SalesForce has a similar type of API but one which is SOAP-based. LongJump’s offering differs from Amazon’s newly released SimpleDB service by functioning as a MySQL-based relational database service, whereas SimpleDB possesses its own architecture. For more information on LongJump’s API, check out the company’s API guide.

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It is the exact same business model as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Meanwhile, Salesforce is already moving into Coghead’s custom-application territory with Force.com, which it launched in September). Coghead faces other competition from Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, WyaWorks, and LongJump. The online database/app creation market is getting crowded, and there is only room for one or two platforms. Salesforce is already one of them. If Coghead can make it easier to develop Web apps for the enterprise than anyone else and attract a following, it’s got a shot at that coveted platform status. We’ll be keeping an eye on its progress.

Has anyone used Coghead? How does it compare to the competition? Please let us know in comments.

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Unless you already have a large audience like SalesForece, relying on users to create applications on your platform makes the service is somewhat useless until someone creates one. So, as promised earlier, LongJump has seeded their platform with a suite of applications that can be remixed by their users. The suite consists of 13 business applications that will be free to use through the end of the year. The applications include a collaboration suite and tools for customer management, sales, HR, and Finance.

Applications can be customized by anyone else. Customizations include adding or modifying new data objects such as creating a contact object or triggering new actions when information enters the system. For instance, if a contact is added, email the sales team about it. These modifications fork the application into your own private copy, which you can keep for yourself or share with others.

The collaboration suite, OfficeSpace, is the most complex of the applications and lets users share personal and group calendars, assign tasks, store documents, and collaborate through wikis. Each of the functions is organized under its own tab, with a master dashboard where each user can puts widgets of the pieces they’re interested in.

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At its core Force competes as a development platform with .NET, Java, etc. But there are also a slew of startups that have focused on allowing people to easily create and deploy database driven applications – DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. All will take a hit from Force. In fact, this may be sort of game ending for them. Salesforce has its eyes on much bigger fish than those startups.

Any internal process or function that requires custom software may be a candidate for Force. Disney, which has been testing the platform, is using it to manage character (Mickey Mouse, etc.) appearances. EA has built a recruiting application. Bronx School is using Force to manage attendance, performance, etc. Salesforce says they can actually manage the entire school on Force.

Salesforce is also announcing VisualSource, a set of tools that allow developers to build applications for multiple devices (tablets, iphone, etc.) and add HTML, AJAX and Flex to Force applications (making for much nicer looking and more user friendly applications). See the screen shot below for an example user interface.

Pricing is a flat $25/month/user.

Salesforce has always said its about software as a service. Next week, they say they’re deploying the platform as a service with Force. I imagine they’ll find a receptive customer base.

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This is a crowded space, and there’s a reason for it. These tools let non-developers create useful and otherwise expensive applications for busineses that can be accessed directly or via the intranet. They can also be tailored to an infinite degree, giving companies more flexibility with off the shelf stuff. Most of these tools also allow for simple web application building as well, from simple web forms to more complicated, interactive applications.

LongJump, which launches today, is the newest entrant. The new service is a spinoff of an already profitable business, Relationals, which was founded in 2003. The founder, 37 year old Pankaj Malviya, says the company needs no additional funding in the near future.

LongJump is focused on letting people create applications without any programming skills whatsoever – something Coghead is also striving for. In a demo yesterday I watched Malviya create a couple of applications very quickly, including a highly customized shared contact and calendar resource for a business.

LongJump is also approaching their community in a realy smart way – like Ning, applications can be shared with other LongJump users, cloned, and customized. Sharing is optional, and all business data is stripped out and replaced with sample data. But in the near future users will be able to build on what others have created, giving LongJump a nice library of sample applications.

The ease of use combined with the community sharing features are really thoughtful additions to the product. We’ll check back in with them in a couple of months and see how the library of applications is coming along.

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