IT giant Microsoft has cooperated with Ethereum collective ConsenSys to offer development tools for its enterprise users through the Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft has announced a partnership with ConsenSys, a New York-based Ethereum-coder group that will enable enterprise customers on the Azure cloud platform to get an access to the Ethereum Blockchain-as-a-Service (E BaaS).
“Focusing on financial services we saw a lot of potential for a framework and platform like Ethereum to go across the platform of financial institutions and modernize a lot of processes that were stuck in the past. We thought that Ethereum was a really good platform for building distributed ledger applications,” Marley Gray, Director of Technology Strategy, US Financial Services at Microsoft, told Techcrunch.
The E BaaS is planned to be launched at DEVCON1 conference that will take place on 10th November in London. The first offerings that will be available for Azure users involve BlockApps Strato and Ether.Camp, tools utilized for creating Ethereum applications based on the blockchain. Ether.Camp tool can also be applied for securities trading, cross-border payments and corporate accounting. BlockApps is actually a sandbox where people can experiment and develop their applications before launching it for usage.
According to John Lilic, who operates ConsenSys Enerprise activities, the team intends to provide their business partners with blockchain solutions that don’t necessary touch their internal systems. “We can deploy a private blockchain; the foundational elements that businesses need from the technology side. Then as we build out a prototype, we can together go through that discovery process and teach them along the way. And in doing so they now have a blockchain. They can now interact with it and build upon it and expand it in the future,” Lilic told IBTimes.
“To that end, ConsenSys and Microsoft have been working together and we have formed a partnership. We see Microsoft as the agnostic fabric on top of which components can reside – a global blockchain ecosystem,” he added.
With the use of the Microsoft’s platform, developers can build applications running on free semi-private or private blockchain networks. ConsenSys founder, Joseph Lubin, commented: “At some point you can spin up a public node and in the integrated development environment you can click one button and deploy your debugged program to the public Ethereum blockchain,” says Lubin. “And that will cost you about 2 cents or 5 cents worth of Ether and then your application is deployed. People using your application may spend a penny or less than a penny to interact.”
The tool kits will belong to ConsenSys, a software production studio established by Joseph Lubin a year ago. The group, which comprises about 60 developers, is concentrated on creating decentralized applications.
Polina is an undergraduate student at Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) where she is studying at the faculty of International Business Communication for a degree specializing in Intercultural Communication. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, music and travelling.