Safe harbor statement

The information you will find below is very forward looking, but our intentions are to make these points come true. They may, however, change, be dropped or even improved as time progresses, so there is no guarantee from us these things will all happen as noted. Please just always remember, we dearly and badly want them to become a reality. We feel the points below are all major pain points for many website owners, which PaaS and cloud computing can help solve.  Please read on and take a leap of faith with us!

Overview

• Responsibility

• Security

• Upgrading

• The stuff admin dreams are made of

• Automatic scaling

• A smart platform for developers and designers

• Development Speed

• Overall better customer satisfaction

Responsibility

We really believe cloud computing is the future. The main reason for this, in our minds, is the proper sharing of responsibilities. Cloud computing finally puts the responsibilities and the capabilities where they belong.

IAAS – Infrastructure as a Service

This is the bottom of the totem pole of a strong and resilient web presence. You need a strong network connection, powerful and safe data centers. You also need an infrastructure, which allows any combination of scaling at any time, worldwide. You also need a very competent team of people to work the infrastructure, the myriad of hardware, to keep it up to date and modern, without interrupting your service unnecessarily. You need a dependable and very trustworthy partner who can give you all this.

PaaS – Platform as a Service

The next level of a great web presence is the platform. You need the coding base to build your application. You need the server software put together to serve your site’s data quickly, safely and efficiently. You need people to keep this platform up to date and to also make sure they have clear line between core platform features and the next level SaaS features. You need this part of your system to be robust, yet completely flexible. You need them to keep the platform very safe too.

SaaS – Software as a Service

This will be your area of expertise! This is where you concentrate on the business logic and presentation. You alone decide what your users should be seeing and doing. You can develop applications faster and smarter, because you have the building blocks below you with IaaS and PaaS. You also only pay for what you use, so costs are much easier to calculate and predict.

You can concentrate fully on what you do best!

Continue reading to find out how Skooppa is going to help you do exactly what you do best, as a PaaS solution.

Security

You shouldn’t have to worry about security within the Skooppa platform.

Data and site security will be our absolute top priorities. If something should ever become insecure, it will be fixed first and as fast as possible. We will actually do everything in our power to not even get into an insecure situation. That will be our promise to you. It isn’t really a pain point, but read on.

Automatic security releases

While our “on-premise” competition (the software you have to download and upload on your own server/web space) releases security fixes in an email sent to you as their customer or in a notice in their admin panel, which you might not see for days, we will already be implementing any security fixes in the Skooppa platform for you. That means, for instance, you could even be on vacation and have real peace of mind that your site is safe. Because, in the eventuality of a security risk, we will fix it for you…automatically.

Secure data

Some people feel cloud computing is inherently insecure because of the multi-tenant model and sharing of computing resources. In such an invironment, customer and user data end up in systems, which aren’t actually physically separated and thus, could get “mixed up” or it would be much easier to compromise that data in such an environment.

Although the concerns are warranted, they are not founded. We feel a system is only as safe as the safeguards and protection within them. Security has nothing to do with the locality of data, but everything to do with the measures taken to keep data secure. We feel cloud computing must be actually safer for it to work. And, it is!

Data ownership and vendor lock-in

Although not a pain point, we’d just like to mention these two arguments against cloud computing and PaaS or SaaS. All Skooppa customers will own all the data their sites produce and just like with any hosting provider, you can leave and take your data with you. So no lock-in there.

As for system lock-in. This is unavoidable. It is also the same with on-premise software. As soon as you decide to go with any software/ system, your data must conform to the data models of that software or system. A change away from that software or system always entails migration work. So, Software as a Service or Platform as a Service cloud offerings are exactly the same in this respect to on-premise systems or software. Vendor lock-in isn’t anything to worry about unnecessarily with our system.

Upgrading

Just as security issues will be dealt with and corrected by us automatically, we will also upgrade the Skooppa platform for you automatically too. That is the real beauty about PaaS/ SaaS. All upgrades to Skooppa will be implemented in a smart release program, which will be done automatically.

You might be saying, “But there could be something in a release, which I simply don’t want.” Yes, we know this may be the case and therefore mission critical features will only be turned on, when the owner of a site turns them on. This will be a fine line between us, our customers and even the users of the Skooppa network. We realize that. But, we actually feel this will be a factor, which will actually build up trust within our relationships.

Since Skooppa will be PaaS, upgrades will happen relatively quickly.

Our aim is to have upgrades not even bother your production environment and that means no down time. We are still looking into this possibility and see some challenges, but we definitely don’t want good stuff being added to the system to cause any pain in any way.

The stuff experienced admin dreams are made of, but all Skooppa customers will get!

Automatic upgrading is already a great relief of a long standing pain point, but getting the best of the best for our customers is where we really stand above the rest.

Almost all on-premise software owners are basically slaves to their hosting providers and what they can provide them and at the prices they are paying. If something exotic or simply different is needed to get a web site optimized or running better, it generally comes with a hefty time, cost and even user satisfaction price tag.

Skooppa site owners will have a huge advantage with “economy of scale” both in the cloud environment we use and also with our platform. Since customers are on the Skooppa platform, they will all benefit from the same cool stuff we can give each of them.  Here are just a few of the cool things we are looking at or are possible….

• A built-in, very powerful and fast Elasticsearch
• Built-in SSL and SPDY integration
• We can design the Skooppa system to work with caching systems smartly like op-code, Memcached and proxy caching, which means an optimized performance overall.
• We can design data persistence (the database backend) to use the best of all worlds as we need them, for instance noSQL for notifications and user tracking/ logging (with MongoDB) and for more transactional and traditional SQL needs like with a shopping cart system (with MySQL or even Oracle).
• Including one of the largest Content Delivery Networks in the world as part of the overall system for every customer.
• Asynchronous tasking – sending off server intensive tasks to “worker” servers relieving web servers, again for top site performance

We can simply do magical things with our code and our system, which other on-premise software vendors just can’t even dream about doing without a ton of extra support and costs and issues for both the customer and the vendor.

This “cool stuff” in Skooppa just happens, because it must and can in a cloud computing environment.

It is a fact of on-premise software vendors lives. They are limited completely by the “unknown” hosting services and environments their customers are using and thus must work within the realms of those limits. Often their progress is hampered due to having to find the right mix in their design to make the major part of their customer base happy. But, they can’t cover them all. We can! They shoot for budget level. We shoot for high performance. We have to, in order to make the Skooppa platform work for everyone with a very high page delivery rate.

We also don’t have to worry about any mix of software to get it right for a majority of our customers one bit. Our only limit is really our own imaginations and the imaginations of our customers!  It is such an invigorating thought to be able to take on so many challenges, which make site owners’ lives difficult and actually be able to do something about them too……… and we will and can, through PaaS!

Automatic scaling

If you grow, Skooppa grows automatically with you.

No server size concerns, so no need to worry about migrating your site to a new server should your site get too big to fit the current server you have. You will also avoid the relatively long down times server migrations may cause.
Also, if you should get a spike in “real” traffic, it will be covered by Skooppa robotically, without any loss of service, even if you are on a “small” version of the platform. If the spike is only short term, you only pay for the increased scaling, as it happened. In the long term, this automatic scaling could mean a lower cost of ownership for your Skooppa site compared to “old-fashioned” hosting, because you don’t have to have bigger and more expensive servers sitting there with unused capacity waiting for that spike of traffic or your growth to happen.

A smart platform for developers and designers

Developers will be able to create new and creative applications on top of the Skooppa platform much faster, because they can concentrate purely on application logic. Everything else is taken care of for them, like user administration, authentication, registration, user permission system, etc.

Designers will have a template and design engine built to meet their explicit needs to create new designs for Skooppa as quickly and easily as possible.

Skooppa will have a system to practically instantaneously deploy applications, designs and changes to those applications and designs straight through the Skooppa system.

Each customer will also have their own sandbox to make (or let someone make) programmatic, design and business logic changes and test in, before they can move changes to their live systems. This is actually part of the system security too. Once the changes are made in the sandbox and are all identified in a change set, the move to get them in the live system will be just a press of a button. Moving their changes to their live system will even be possible without any downtime!

Full sandboxes (an option) will have a refresh system, so live data can be pushed back into the sandbox to continue development with that live data. This will happen also with just a push of a button.

Each developer or designer will get their own development environments for free. This will be a major part of a very in-depth Skooppa developer program.

There will be an Application “store” or “shop”, where customers can get free and paid applications and extensions to applications for their Skooppa instances and install them into their sandboxes “on the fly” and free of charge to test and use. And, finally transferring the apps to their live system will be the point in time, where paid apps will have to be paid for. So each customer can test any application at any time for an unlimited period.

Should developers create major apps (free or paid), they will also get an instance of Skooppa to market and support their products, also free of charge. They’ll only have to pay a relatively small yearly fee, to take part in the developer program.

Development Speed

With Skooppa, the cloud computing environment we will use is pure and is completely designed by us. It is ours in the sense of, we control it. We only develop for this one single environment and that gives us a big advantage we give straight back to our customers.

Faster development speed.

We can also choose the best of all worlds, so Skooppa customers will get the best performance we can possibly give them. We won’t need to worry about issues with different versions of supporting software. That also means, compatibility with newer versions of any supporting software isn’t an issue for our customers anymore, as we control the environment Skooppa runs on. There are no “minimum requirements” with Skooppa.

If there is a minimum requirement with Skooppa, it will be you must be willing to think “out-of-the-box”!

IF mistakes in the Skooppa development are made, and we don’t deny they may happen, they can be found and resolved very, very fast. And thus, our resolution speed will often be much faster than that of on-premise application vendors, because we won’t have to piece a certain kind of system together to reproduce a certain issues that may arise because of some strange setting of some support software on some exotic hosting service.
There will be NO legacy versions of our system to worry about. Skooppa is all there will be as a pay for performance system and it will grow constantly and consistently. The only time legacy versions might come into play is with the applications built on the Skooppa API. But we have some ideas to solve this pain point too.

Overall better customer satisfaction

We’ve covered a number of major pain points above and thus, automatically we expect customer satisfaction to be at a level never seen before. But we definitely won’t stop there. Quality releases and a top quality system will be ever so important to us. It is THE foundation for a trustworthy system. We understand this and will live by it! We just can’t do it any other way. We don’t want to do it any other way.

We also understand constant improvement must happen. There is no stopping it. Change is the only constant in life and we want positive change. As Skooppa grows, it must also improve. Stagnation isn’t a word in our vocabulary either…

because….

……you pay for our performance AND we can only be successful, if you are successful! Our success depends solely on yours, as a PaaS! These company<-> customer<-> user<-> 3rd party developer relationships will be a very tight symbiosis.

In order for all of us to “live” well together, we all must be successful together.

We, at Skooppa, will gladly listen to our customer and developer and even user groups and do as much as we can to make your success something you don’t need to expect, it will be something you simply get.

We actually feel it is going to be extremely fun to get these many new things done for you too. If you join us, you can be rest assured we are looking out for your welfare. We just couldn’t do it any other way and be a winning system for you. That is THE biggest advantage for us being a PaaS system. Quality is a given.

If you’d like to now, we’d really appreciate it. Please pass the word.:)

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