Software AG, Late to the Cloud, Acquires LongJump’s Platform

Germany’s Software AG, which has been land-locked with on-premises enterprise software packages, finally added a cloud infrastructure platform to its catalog April 25 by acquiring privately held Santa Clara, Calif.-based LongJump.

Terms of the deal were not released.

LongJump, which only has 19 employees but whose 230 customers include Cisco Systems and AT&T, is a bootstrapped operation that has taken no investment from venture capital firms during its 10-year lifespan, LongJump founder and CEO Pankaj Malviya told eWEEK.

Software AG may be late to the cloud, but it’s doing its cloud implementation in its own way. LongJump’s platform-as-a-service capabilities enable applications to be deployed in public or private clouds, on-premises or to any mobile device, Malviya said.

“There is something very different about how everybody is moving to the cloud and how they [Software AG] are moving to the cloud,” Malviya said. “Almost all of the other players are saying, ‘Hey, we are cloud-based,’ but they are just spinning up another instance of Amazon EC2 to claim they are in the cloud.

“Software AG is sending a strong message that with LongJump, they have a pure cloud vendor, because LongJump has its own strong meta-database, multitenancy platform that will allow Software AG customers to build flexible situational and process-driven applications in the cloud with minimal development times,” Malviya said.

With the acquisition of LongJump, Software AG now can provide:

–Self-service development: This is key to overcoming the resource constraints that IT groups are facing as they digitize their enterprise.

–Standard cloud applications: Deployment of solutions on the public or private cloud, on-premises or within hybrid environments offers flexibility when choosing the development, deployment and production environments.

–Flexible process-based applications: Application development is based on a flexible process approach utilizing models and templates (metadata). No coding is necessary.

–Mobile applications: Deployment to any mobile device is supported, since applications are automatically mobile-ready with built-in security and access based on enterprise authentication policies.

“With this latest acquisition, we have taken a major step in optimizing both the business knowledge and IT skills needed to develop flexible, business process driven, situational applications and deploy them rapidly wherever they are needed,” Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost said.

Malviya told eWEEK that he and his staff will remain on board after the acquisition is finalized and that LongJump will welcome the international reach and customer ecosystem that Software AG has built over decades in business.

Software AG has about 5,400 employees in 70 countries and had revenues of $1.37 billion (€1.05 billion) in 2012.