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LongJump, a platform for on-demand business applications, has announced a new Workflow-as-a Service component, called LongJump Workflow Designer, described by company officials as "a visual environment to design and deploy business workflows."

 

Generally with workflow automation, organizing and sequencing how work gets done improves communication and collaboration between team members, across company departments and between suppliers and partners. Implementing workflows is of value when they model and reflect how a business really operates.

 

"Until now, there has been a big hole in the market for this type of capability. While there are a lot of workflow products available, they are difficult to use, customize or adapt in order to support new business processes," said Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of LongJump. Using Workflow Designer, he added, businesses can "supercharge their LongJump applications to make them far more relevant to the workers who use them."

 

Built on Adobe Flex, LongJump's product is designed to let "non-technical business users" design workflows, customize processes on-the-fly, assign access rights, and trigger e-mail and task notifications, company officials say, "all with drag-and-drop commands."

 

With Workflow Designer, users capture their workflow processes using "States" and "Actions" to create steps, assign staff to be a part of any specific step, and connect these steps into the correct sequential routing order. For example, Human Resources may establish a customized workflow process for new job candidates, whereby the workflow process takes the potential candidate's record through multiple hand-offs and stages, including resume review, telephone interview, in-person interview and multiple interviewer sign-offs and approvals.

 

Early this year LongJump unveiled application programming interfaces to let LongJump's platform deliver a "Database-as-a-Service" offering.

 

LongJump's new DaaS gives companies self-provision relational database access and storage on-demand, according to the LongJumpers. Similar to Amazon's S3 on-demand storage service, LongJump gives developers something for housing their Web-based applications.

 

LongJump's DaaS provides an environment for hosting a Web-enabled database marketed as "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."

 

"Businesses want unified Web applications that help them manage their critical business information and processes with increased team communication and collaboration," said Pankaj Malviya, LongJump's founder and CEO.