CIOs and IT Leaders

Who Benefits

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  Business Leaders

  CIOs & IT Leaders

  ISVs & Service Providers

  Sales & Marketing Leaders

  Application Developers

The Long Tail of Business Applications

To make great decisions, business users need the right information. However, businesses today struggle with key management issues around connecting to legacy data, sharing it with teams that need it, providing reporting tools and visibility, and using information to drive business processes.

For enterprise-wide challenges, large scale deployments of costly application infrastructures like BPM, BAM, and BPO systems or other enterprise application architectures are built to provide basic application-to-application connection and integration.

But for the business users, information workers, and analysts, the default data management solution is the spreadsheet. However, for really complex information management requirements, spreadsheets are only good to a certain point.  After that you need a more powerful solution.

Another option would be to ask IT to develop a custom application, however getting the mindshare from IT and getting the project prioritized for development in a code-heavy platforms (.NET, J2EE) will take a long time to get started, even longer to complete, and even longer to update or change as business requirements change.

Alternatively, the worst case scenario would be a departmental, home-grown application pulled together by well meaning but people unqualified to build production software in the enterprise.  The most common result is an application that only meets the minimal user expectation, it becomes something that is hard to manage and update, costly to maintain, and could pose information security risks.  These siloed applications and information stores create a distraction for the organization as they now have to devote resources to integration, management, backup and can create information security and governance issues.

These scenarios represent the problem called the long tail of IT – business users legitimately needing information management applications but can’t secure the resources internally to do it the best possible way so they rely on their own creativeness and ingenuity to solve the problem. 

This approach over time will actually end up costing companies in lost productivity, higher management costs, and increasing complexity.

The Application Platform Approach

What is needed is a business application platform that enables IT and business units to collaborate to quickly to design, build and deploy information management applications. With a Business Application Platform (BAP), situational and composite applications are easy-to-create, easy-to-maintain, and consolidate a variety of information and processes to manage specific aspects of a business or organization. This allows organizations to:

• Leverage all SOA (service oriented architecture) investments by aggregating web service data from CRMs, ERP, HR, BPM, and BAM

• Visually create forms, reports, dashboards, schedued processes, validations, data policies, and workflows

• Reduce internal customer requests for new applications or updates with a single, business-friendly, self-service platform for customization and reporting

• Centralize control on a robust platform to reduce silo and ad hoc applications and uncontrollable spreadsheet operations

• Support traditional IT development methodology for custom development projects

The LongJump Platform for the Enterprise

LongJump provides a complete business application platform for creating composite, information management applications. Businesses can use the platform to create variety of web-based situational and composite applications with reusable data objects. Each application has a complete user interface and provides connectivity to industry standard methods for information exchange.

Not only will LongJump reduce your development cycle from months to weeks, it will accelerate your time to value, control the costs and deployment of delivering solutions, and provide a mature, flexible platform for meeting ongoing application requests.

The platform provides all the technology needed to deliver powerful, adaptable, integrated solutions including: