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FEATURE
Silverlight for Business
But the killer part has to be the new streaming service. We’ve known for a while that Microsoft has been pouring billions of dollars into building a set of data centres around the world, in what has been quietly referred to as “Live 2.0”, although lips have been kept firmly sealed as to what this actually meant. The first part of the story has been revealed, but you still wouldn’t need such a huge data centre infrastructure to host a few home videos.
Since video will be such a key element of the Silverlight platform, Microsoft is offering to host the content for you – for free. Clearly, it can’t do this without some boundaries, but the limitations are hardly onerous – you’ll get 4GB of storage and one million “eye-minutes” of video streaming per month. Beyond this point, there’ll be a sliding scale of charges based on what type of deal you want. For example, you might want to keep your solution free of advertising and pay the full rate for the bandwidth, or you might accept some adverts in return for charges that could be as cheap as nothing at all.
You don’t have to go to Microsoft to do the video streaming – you could host it yourself or buy it from a third party – but the message is clear that worldwide, high-bandwidth, high-availability streaming of video data requires huge investment in hardware, facilities and connectivity, and that Microsoft is currently making that investment. And it will be just as relevant to the small company as it will be to the likes of broadcasters; why would the BBC want to run its own data centres for future streaming media when there’s a partner out there who can do the job better and, in all probability, more cheaply too?
Now things get a little more interesting, as we move away from the mainstream announcements of the conference into the area of smiles, nods and knowing looks that I’ve received in private briefings with senior Microsoft people. First, it’s clear this streaming service isn’t only for the video part of your apps, but can be for everything: the installable runtime, the code, web services and bitmaps. At present, there’s no facility for server-side data processing, but comments such as “it would make sense for us to offer that in the future” suggest it’s coming soon. Similarly, server-side credit-card processing definitely falls into the wry smile and “you may think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment” category.
This opens up a huge range of possibilities. Let’s assume you want to build a web e-shop. Write your application in Silverlight and let Microsoft (or a partner) host the app, distribute it for you, manage the installation and runtime, and the whole payment stack. Some people might worry this is putting too many eggs into one basket, and not without some justification – such fears will need to be allayed by proving them wrong, rather than by washing them away in a torrent of wild promises and subsequent non-deliveries.
I suggested to some Microsoft staff that full integration with the System Center range of management tools would be a must for any sort of line-of-business application run on a grown-up network. It won’t suffice to have network management hit a brick wall at the edges of your own physical network, only to get nothing back from a large distributed application held out there on the “cloud”. Remember that Microsoft can not only host your application, but also take care of its running: you might want to keep things running on your internal servers for the main part of your load, but spawn it off onto external servers when additional power is required. Or the app might be entirely cloud-hosted. Or some variable mixture of the two. Whatever mix you go for, it must be fully manageable.
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