A military reconnaissance team has been asked to monitor a developing confrontation in the town of Faluja.  Available assets include wireless sensor systems equipped with high-quality video systems covertly deployed on rooftops in the city, Predator aircraft and autonomous vehicles.  The mission commander wishes to assemble a mission-control console synthesizing data from these and other military data sources (maps, information about locations of sensitive civilian sites, information about enemy positions and capabilities) into a single active Web-like system that can be carried on a laptop and will be kept up to date as the situation changes.

Using traditional technologies, it might take years to define the specific needs for such an application, contract the development work to a military contractor, await delivery of an acceptable and robust prototype and then field the resulting solution.  Making matters worse, the prevailing technology options yield insecure and unreliable solutions that are costly to deploy and expensive to maintain, and that can be disabled not just by intentional acts but also by the most trivial mishaps or configuration mistakes.

QuickSilver can play multiple roles that add up to slashed development time, rapid deployment, and incredible robustness, scalability and flexibility.  These include:

Thus, a QuickSilver supported solution can be developed quickly, deployed quickly, and will remain operational even when a more traditional implementation would be crippled.

Ricochet, similarly, can assist developers in creating new cluster-hosted services that scale seamlessly as loads increase and maintain time-critical responsiveness even when faults occur.  Tempest automates the use of Ricochet, so that developers don't even need to be aware that the web services solutions they are developing will run on multiple nodes.  Tempest works with standard web services applications, automatically transforms them into replicated solutions, and automates their deployment and management on a cluster or data center.

Again, by making life easy for the developer and addressing quality of service and self-management aspects normally ignored, our work yields solutions that will cut total cost of development and ownership of solutions even as it supports a much more sophisticated style of service in a highly automated manner.