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FAQs

General Knowledge

What is Cloud Computing?

For the full description of cloud computing, see the WorkXpress article here; http://www.workxpress.com/what-is-cloud-computing

Cloud computing - just infrastructure?

Cloud computing has three components, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Servers and infrastructure are a very small part of the real value proposition of cloud computing. See the WorkXpress website article for a full description of cloud computing http://www.workxpress.com/what-is-cloud-computing

5GL - Been tried for years!

People HAVE been trying to build a purely visual development language for years, but other attempts have only yielded partial success. Today, there are quite a few visual development tools on the market, but all suffer from some limitation or another involving lack of access to the data layer, lack of logic capabilities, or lack of presentational capabilities.

WorkXpress is the first true 5th generation development language. For a full description of what makes WorkXpress the first 5GL please see the website article here; http://www.workxpress.com/what-is-a-5gl-paas

For an academic study describing and validating WorkXpress's claim to the 5GL moniker, please see this whitepaper; http://www.workxpress.com/case-study/workxpress-whitepaper-5gl-3gl.pdf

Technical

Is it Secure?

The problem with security is that every new application; …is built by a new team, …using different tools and methods, …to build different code, …that includes different security vulnerabilities, …and therefore needs its own security testing, …and ultimately needs its own remediation.

A Digital Assessment Survey showed on average; …1 vulnerability for every 8 lines of code, and 1 CRITICAL vulnerability for every 69 lines of code

Solution: Eliminate application security concerns at the platform level The WorkXpress architecture allows developers to build applications that pass application-level security tests…AUTOMATICALLY.

How? WorkXpress is a secure platform with a unique, proprietary architecture. Because of this, the applications built on top of WorkXpress do not need to be independently penetration tested - they are automatically secured according to level of security applied to the platform itself.

In other words, one secure platform saves thousands of applications from having to be tested and secured individually, avoiding enormous expense of time, cost, training and remediation. Security features include;

  • Encrypted URLs
  • Hardened against XSS scripting
  • No JS allowed
  • Hardened against SQL injection
  • Penetration tested
  • Unified up‐to‐date package set
  • Physical and network security are controllable
  • No anonymous API or user access

Additionally, the WorkXpress platform provides critical Data-security tools

  • Data encryption in transit
  • Data encryption at rest as needed
  • Data redaction of critical privacy information
  • Supported infrastructure offers compliance including SAAS70, Federal, HIPAA, HITECH, PCI and more.

For one example of how a specific public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, supports a range of compliances please see http://aws.amazon.com/security/

Do I have to use your servers?

No.

WorkXpress support both public and private cloud servers. From the WorkXpress perspective, a private cloud server is any OVF-compliant virtual container designated as an “appliance” and provided the WorkXpress private cloud appliance URL.

What is the underlying technology stack?

WorkXpress relies on a variant of the LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL.

Variants of this stack power the largest web applications in the world including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and many more. In fact, as the numbers below suggest, the components of the LAMP stack dominate their respective marketplaces;

  • Linux accounts for about 80% of all web servers used in the world.
  • Apache powers approximately 60% of all web sites.
  • MySQL accounts for approximately 40% of all database usage by developers globally.
  • PHP is used by approximately 78% of all web servers utilizing server-side programming languages.

Can we use our existing service providers or internal IT teams?

Of course.

The two key tenants of WorkXpress are “choice” and “empowerment”. We want to empower you to make all manner of choices about how you build and deploy in the cloud. By turning your existing IT teams loose on a 5GL PaaS environment, you will greatly enhance your organizations software automation capabilities and responsiveness to change in your business environment.

What's more, you can make the choice to empower your business teams as well, while maintaining centrally key aspects of control, security and oversight. WorkXpress is the ideal tool to deploy as the standard platform environment in your organization.

If you standardize around WorkXpress, your organization will become a more potent and flexible competitor.

Are we "locked in"?

In fact, WorkXpress makes it very easy to migrate away from if that's the direction you decide to take;

  1. Migrate your data at any time using WorkXpress extract tools
  2. Use WorkXpress's code documentation feature to provide a highly detailed specification document to your new development team. This will give them a very specific map to follow that doesn't leave out any details.

How big is your company

WorkXpress is a privately held company incorporated in the State of Pennsylvania in the beginning of 2003. WorkXpress has not accepted venture capital, and enjoys a healthy revenue stream from satisfied customers.

Over 35,000 unique individuals log into WorkXpress based applications, from countries all around the world.

In recent years, WorkXpress has enjoyed greater than 50% year over year growth.

WorkXpress board members include George Fischer, EVP Worldwide Sales CA http://www.workxpress.com/media-a-releases/88-workxpress-paas-names-george-fischer-to-board-of-directors and Bob Joyce, President, Versatile Inc. http://www.workxpress.com/media-a-releases/88-workxpress-paas-names-george-fischer-to-board-of-directors.

What if WorkXpress gets bought out / goes out of business / something goes wrong?

Your business continuity is very important to us, so we provide four powerful risk mitigation tools for you;

  1. Cloud choice - host your servers wherever you like including public clouds and behind your own firewall. In this way, any failure to provide services won't immediately impact your business operations.
  2. Long term agreements - WorkXpress is willing to provide long term licensing agreements to guarantee that critical aspects of your operations and financial projections aren't at risk
  3. Rapid migration - WorkXpress provides data extraction tools and code documentation tools to minimize the difficulty off migrating to alternate technologies.
  4. Source code escrow - For Enterprise clients, WorkXpress is able to provide the ultimate in risk-mitigation, source code escrow. Any triggering event such as failure to provide services will trigger the release of the necessary code you may eventually need to maintain your operations.

What Contracts will we need?

Evaluation/Competitive

Do you work in my Industry / Geography / etc.?

Why have I not heard of you before?

Probably a bigger player has something like this in the makings?

How do you stack up against other PaaS providers?

Partnership

What if we are a committed Microsoft/etc. Partner?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market

Is PaaS still in early adoption?

What is the market potential of 5GL?

Other

What if my team is too busy to take on a new technology right now?

What if we don't have a history of doing custom development?

start/faqs.1347906377.txt.gz · Last modified: 2012/09/17 18:26 by treff
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