Microsoft's Ethereum blockchain-as-a-service boosts mobile device development

As enterprises’ fascination with mobile rapid application development has shifted to embracing smart contracts, blockchain applications and utilities to build ecosystems are growing at a breakneck pace.

Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), provided by Microsoft Cloud Platform and ConsenSys, allows customers to create private blockchains, public blockchains, and consortium-based blockchain environments. The framework provides the foundation for adding features such as Cortana Analytics (machine learning), Power BI (data visualization tools), Azure Active Directory (cloud identity and access management), Office 365 (network office system), and crmol (government online customer relationship management). In the coming years, the new development framework will stimulate the development of blockchain applications.

Ethereum BaaS applied to cloud computing platform

In November 2015, Marley Gray, director of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise strategy, BizDev & Strategy, announced a partnership with Consensys to jointly provide an Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on Azure. Consensys Ethereum has developed four core technical parts that jointly facilitate this Ethereum decentralized application platform:

1. Cryptographic tokens and addresses: A precisely secure and unique system of credentials that can be used to pay for goods, services or assets, or to represent an anonymous identity.

2. Peer-to-peer network: Individual users connect their computers together to form a network and exchange data without a central server.

3. Consensus formation algorithm: This algorithm allows blockchain users to reach a consensus on the current state of the blockchain.

4. Turing-complete virtual computer: A virtual machine is a computer that exists in software, and "Turing-complete" means that the software can run any computer program.

Big companies looking for small companies

What practical things can be obtained from Microsoft's blockchain development platform? In April 2016, blockchain development company Gem partnered with Philips Healthcare on a blockchain project using Ethereum. Gem is building an ecosystem for healthcare to solve clinical data, claims processing, pharmaceutical supply chain, health Internet, universal health ID and genomic data management. In January 2016, Gem received an additional $7.1 million in funding in Series A financing, bringing the cumulative funding to $10.4 million. Some investors supported Gem in the early years, including Pelion Venture Partners and KEC Ventures, Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, RRE Ventures, Tamarisk Global, Drummond Road Capital, Tekton Ventures, Amplify.LA, Danmar Capital and James Joaquin.

Gem was founded in 2014 and Philips was founded in 1891. Philips' sales in personal care, health and wellness, and home appliances reached $12.01 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015. Philips started its 2015 strategy at the beginning of the year and established Royal Philips (HealthTech) operating model at the end of 2014 to fully utilize Health Tech. According to its fourth quarter performance in 2015, Philips said that its goal is to achieve a potential market of $154 billion (CAGR 2014-2018) by increasing the annual compound growth rate of each of the six major health opportunities.

1. Healthy Living ($38 trillion, 4% CAGR)

2. Disease prevention ($17 trillion, CAGR greater than 10%)

3. Disease diagnosis ($3.9 billion, CAGR 6%)

4. Disease treatment ($17 trillion, 7% CAGR)

5. Home care ($1.7 billion, CAGR greater than 10%)

6. Monitoring, information and connected care ($28 trillion, 4% CAGR)

Gem is not alone, it has strong competition from the likes of bitalo, BitGo, block.io and quickwallet. The challenge faced by many companies exploring blockchain issues is that many blockchain companies appear to be similar. A cursory study of the value of blockchain companies yields a vague view of returns, however, further research provides a different perspective, once the infrastructure and functionality are understood, many core functions vary widely between blockchain companies.

Ether.Camp

Microsoft’s Azure blockchain-as-a-service platform has released two initial tools to facilitate the development of smart contract-based applications:

1. Ether.Camp, an integrated development environment.

2. blockapps, a private, semi-private Ethereum blockchain that can be deployed to the public Ethereum environment.

Ether.Camp, founded by Roman Mandeleil, does three good things. First, the Ether.Camp team built a Java implementation of Ethereum. Second, they created a good ether.camp blockchain explorer. The explorer has similar features as blockchain.info, but it's like an enhanced version 2.0 that allows users to drill down through smart contracts and even track code on the blockchain. Third, it provides a simple, integrated development environment (IDE) that allows developers to play and deploy. Want to build an application that uses the blockchain for receipt confirmation? Your team of developers can use this application to do it.

blockapps, short for "BlockApps STRATO Ethereum Blockchain Network", started with the idea that businesses need blockchain applications, not just blockchains.

The blockapps platform is designed as microservices that allow many-to-many relationships, with a modular architecture enhanced by a management solution, supported by a REST API (allowing access to legacy systems). The core of the system is to facilitate the rapid deployment and management of blockchain applications. Seamless deployment allows developers to create proofs of concept in a test environment and then deploy them to production without additional development. Many of today's products for rapid mobile development, such as angular.io, OutSystems Platform, Salesforce, Mendix, Django, and Spring Boot, do not provide support for blockchain smart contracts. It is inevitable that these industry leaders are racing to incorporate blockchain smart contract capabilities into their platforms.

From Microsoft BlockApps on Azure to Stratis, companies are exploring how to develop application frameworks that can actively develop across systems (Bitcoin and Ethereum) while providing compatibility. In the coming year, we will see more blockchain distributed applications with managed services with one-click deployment frameworks, leveraging managed hosting solutions for scalability and speed.