Get cloud tools, but forget the cloud

Izak Joubert likes what cloud technology can do for him. But he dreads what it might do to him. So he's taking out what he likes from the cloud, putting it in his own data center and keeping it there.

"The cloud is not baked enough to run our infrastructure on that bleeding edge," says the chief technology officer for San Jose-based Nationwide Exchange Services Inc., the largest firm in the U.S. handling 1031-type real estate transactions, where buyers temporarily stash cash between property deals for tax purposes.

Joubert's team had built an ERP-like application using .NET with a Web front end and a SQL Server database. It works great, he says. But not great enough.

Problem?

"The market changes so rapidly and we have to respond," explains Joubert, pointing to tax law changes, acquisitions and market dynamics. "We want to be a financial business not a software development house."

He wanted an application platform that let him quickly create new services without having to update complex database schemas. Joubert evaluated Force.com, App Engine and other cloud services, but settled on Longjump, a service of Relational Networks Inc. in nearby Sunnyvale, Calif.

According to Joubert, Longjump cuts out all of the "building block" work in app dev for his team. As a result, his current development project, which would have taken 18 months using .NET, will be wrapped up after three and half months.

The downside is that Longjump uses Java technology, so there was a steep learning curve for his .NET-savvy programmers, Joubert says.

Conveniently for Nationwide Exchange Services, this week Longjump is officially available for internal use, no longer restricted to cloud users.

Relational Networks CEO Pankaj Malvlya says he expects ISVs to use the on-premises version of Longjump to build and support SaaS versions of their software. But he also thinks corporate users like Joubert will embrace it to, for security and control reasons.

"CIOs don't like paying for every new user added to a service and they don't like putting legacy data in the cloud," Malvyla contends, which prompted the company to push their cloud technology into the corporate data center.

Pricing starts at $60,000. And the feeling of security and control? Priceless, of course.