Value Proposition

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1. How do I know whether eXoDy is right for me?
2. What does eXoDy cost in absolute terms and relative to similar products?
3. Have you done a TCO analysis to show how this investment might be justified?
4. Why are people able to get that type of gain with eXoDy?
5. How soon can we see results from the time we start using eXoDy?
6. How would you cost justify the product to management, especially given spending cutbacks and layoffs?

Complementary / Competing Products, Solutions And Standards

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7. Rapid development tools have been around for years. What is so different about your product?
8. How does your product compare with available object-relational mapping tools?
9. How does Oracle JDeveloper fit with eXoDy?
10. Sun claims EJB Container Managed Persistence solves the impedance problem. How is this different?
11. What about EJB Session beans?
12. What about the JDO standard defined by Sun?
13. What is the relationship between eXoDy and application servers?
14. I have an application that requires clustering in order to solve extremely demanding scalability requirements. Can I use eXoDy? If so, must I use it in conjunction with an application server?

Platforms And Prerequisites

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15. What application servers / containers does eXoDy work with, and which ones have you tested?
16. What database servers does eXoDy work with, and which ones have you tested?
17. What IDE’s does eXoDy work with, and which ones have you tested?
18. We are committed to Linux as our web server strategy. How does eXoDy fit?
19. What is required to use eXoDy?

Product Direction

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20. What other database systems do you intend to support?
21. We’re pretty much committed to the Sun J2EE strategy. How does eXoDy fit?
22. We’re pretty much committed to Microsoft’s web strategy. How does eXoDy fit?
23. How does eXoDy position me in the on-going Sun/Microsoft/IBM battles?
24. Where does eXoDy fit in with Web Services and Microsoft .Net?

Migration Strategy

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25. What about my existing Java applications and Oracle databases, already in production?
26. I already have some rapid development tools that do some/most of the things you are talking about. Do I have to quit using them and move entirely over to eXoDy?
27. What about adapting to new releases or changes of the RDBMS version or Java?
28. What if I want to use the new XML, Java Stored Procedures or object relational features of my DBMS?

Risk Factors

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29. You are a small company. How do I minimize my risk?
30. Is this a lock-in strategy?
31. We believe your approach has technical merits. However, some people may view it as contrary to the prevailing trends in the industry. Wouldn't I be taking a risk adopting your strategy?
32. We’re leery of application development tools for our purpose, because we’ve been bitten in the past by their performance and functionality limitations and inflexibility. We’d rather hand-code everything. Why should we trust your solution?
33. Can you provide credible customer references from reputable companies?

Staffing Issues

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34. Everyone I hire is used to visual coding methods. What do they do with eXoDy?
35. We have Java developers and database developers – how do we all work with eXoDy?
36. It sounds like you are trying to put Java and database application developers and consultants out of a job – is that the goal?
37. We’ve never used stored procedures in Oracle, and found them somewhat hard to implement. How hard are they to use, and how much work are they to implement?

Learning Curve

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38. You say your solution includes a “methodology”. How much will we need to change what we already know know to do?
39. XML is one more thing to learn. How much do my developers need to know, and how long will it take?
40. How much training is required? How long will it take people to become fluent? What part of my staff needs to be trained.
41. Are there are lower cost ways of training people?
42. Aren’t you forcing a new methodology on database programmers? Our guys are happy doing things the way they always have – why should they have to do it your way?
43. Isn’t initial development time going to take longer, especially if I’m just learning how to use your eXoDy product and methodology?

Developer Productivity

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44. How much of the time do you really generate the whole application? How much is left for me to do?
45. What type of productivity claims do you make for someone using your eXoDy product?
46. Does eXoDy save me design time in addition to reducing the amount of coding?
47. Do I ever have to modify or look at the generated code?
48. You state that eXoDy reduces the amount of code that needs to be maintained. How much code are we talking about?
49. We have really sophisticated applications, what can we expect in the way of productivity gains?

Performance, Scalability

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50. What about performance – me having to write my own code versus your eXoDy product?
51. We have very large databases. Will we be able to use eXoDy, given that we may have to do serious performance tuning and utilize special features of the database?
52. How does your product develop applications that are more efficient than hand coding? Can you substantiate that?

Security

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53. One of our big issues is security, as we run our whole enterprise on our web enabled databases. How do you handle security?
54. One obvious question: does that mean that someone from Agilis Software could crack the password?
55. Let’s say that someone eventually does crack that password, then what?
56. Do I need the help of a DBA to administer database security?

High Availability

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57. High availability is critical for my application. How does eXoDy fit with our high availability strategy?

Operations And Administration

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58. License managers are always an administrative headache. Is yours?
59. How does eXoDy fit with our system management operational strategy? We use OpenView / Patrol / other.

Product Evaluation

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60. Can I get an evaluation copy of eXoDy to kick the tires and see what the product is like?
61. So I could be working on a project that we think we are going to deploy, and toward the end of the evaluation we are well into the actual project development, and I could tell management to go with the purchase, and our development could be about done?
62. If at that point we decide not to go with eXoDy, is there any way I can continue to use what we have developed during the evaluation /mentoring time period without your product?