Those Sincere yet hilarious PAAS People!

By Alan Wilensky

The guys over at WorkXpress.com are doing a little business continuity reassurance work today by posting a blog article about how portable their product and data architecture is, and how that addresses issues of service continuity. Well, maybe they are new to the real issues of the CLOB application world where failover means instant recovery. I am sure they are working hard on an innovative PAAS platform, but until they understand what the AS400 services crowd understood long ago – continuity means what it says, continuous or predictable Resurrection of services within a specified time frame. As to the usability issues of WorkXpress, see Jane Mcarty’s excellent blog here.

Assuring people that your cloud, PAAS, SAAS solution is just great, is no reassurance at all – it MAY work great, and MAY be reliable MOST of the time, but, if the company and the application are not rated and certified, if your business’ books are not open to any third party (so as to ascertain liquidity) such reassurances are just whitewash. See the original WorkXpress blog post here.

My reply to their post:

“That code can be exported is comforting, but in and of itself does not comprise a complete continuity solution. If a client wants to take a work group app and trade an incumbent architecture for A PAAS, one needs seamless cut-over. Seamless fail over from PASS platform to backup boxes, or to alternative cloud hosts are non-trivial. Saying that data and platform logic is exportable is less than half the battle to CLOB (capital line of business) certified reliability.

Not one or hardly any of the PAAS vendors have been rated, certified. Saying the platform code will be in escrow is also just potential whitewash that does nothing to address the issue of imminent failover. WorkExpress might be a great platform, but merely stating: “WorkXpress is committed to its customers and the quality of its product. To this end it is a privately held, revenue generating company that to date has not received venture capital funding, and is not under pressures to behave in ways that counter to its mission of customers and product…” The foregoing merely says in other words that that Workxpress is unrated by any third party that audits reliability. You guys might have a great product, but for the mission critical CLOB applications, you are in the same boat as any other unrated, unaudited PAAS platform.”

If you are contemplating going the PAAS route, and handing not only your data, but your operations to an unaudited third party that proudly states that they are “privately capitalized and profitable, therefore good for you!”, be careful, very careful indeed.