The Germans are coming - Software AG borgs LongJump

Code-free app design? Sehr gut

Software AG has acquired LongJump, an enterprise-focused company that develops a platform-as-a-service which lets folk build applications without knowing how to code.

The acquisition, whose terms were not dislosed, was announced on Thursday. It will see the MySQL-based technology be knitted into other components of Software AG's large selection of enterprise technologies, and continue to be sold as a standalone hosted or on-premise product.

LongJump "requires no coding for a business analyst to start developing process-driven apps," the company's CEO Pankaj Malviya, told The Register. "All those apps can be created in LongJump with full mobile and tablet capabilities without writing code."

The company has around 230 customers across the US (including Cisco and AT&T,) as well as the UK and Asia Pacific, who use the service to build enterprise apps for tasks like Salesforce automation and incident management. Redundancies are not expected, and it may even grow its staff, Malviya said.

Its Java and MySQL-based technology is available in a hosted format on top of the Rackspace cloud, or can be licensed and whitelabeled by enterprises who are free to host it anywhere they like.

"Since its founding, LongJump has been completely bootstrapped and has not taken any external funding," the company wrote in a statement announcing the acquisition. "However, the acquisition by Software AG is a mutually beneficial opportunity for the companies. LongJump will be able to tap the distribution channels of the global company and Software AG will be able to extend its cloud offerings as well."

LongJump's PaaS is much closer to services produced by companies like Salesforce than traditional hosted app dev PaaSs like Heroku, AppFog, Engine Yard and Amazon Elastic BeanStalk. Where those PaaS's emphasize ease of app deployment by dealing with middleware and interfacing with large public clouds, LongJump is instead focused on a much higher level of infrastructure abstraction.

A better term for it might be application-development-as-a-service (ADAAS), but Vulture West's violently enforced word-cudgel style guide, prevents us from using such terms.

"We will focus on application design [and] process design," Malviya said. "Our focus is how can I allow a citizen to get as much done as possible without writing code - that is the reason."

The LongJump borg follows Software AG's strategic acquisitions of cloudy Java specialist Terracotta in 2011, and UK messaging software developer my-Channels, as the German software company expands its web-delivered software capabilities and diversifies away from being a mostly-mainframe outfit. ®