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Streaming media servers also can support QoS (Quality of Service) and, even better, integrate that support into an SLA (service-level agreement) format. The technology is tailor-made for content providers that want to sell varying degrees of access to partners or customers, especially from a billing perspective. It should come as no surprise then that market analysts, such as the Internet Research Group, predict that multimedia-type traffic, especially streaming media, will represent 40 percent of both B2C and B2B traffic by 2004.

Therein lies the problem. Such growth is bringing with it a host of performance issues that QoS is supposed to help solve. Mapping the software onto an optimal serving infrastructure is time-consuming, expensive and dauntingly complex. While just two or three collocated server farms are needed for a site like barnesandnoble.com to get decent response time during the Christmas rush, B2B service provisioning is a different animal: Its serving side is typically obligated by contract to provide a minimal level of service to its customers.

Web application providers have additional headaches: advanced DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and XHTML (Extensible HTML) pages, JavaScript, ActiveX controls, Java applets, and an ever-increasing number of Web-oriented coding languages and application snippets. Many of these can run nearly independently on the server or the client side, but interactive-business-application serving is bringing with it a new need for constant server-to-client throughput performance. Keeping a customer interested in a product for a few minutes is one thing; making sure your customer is satisfied with daily application performance is another.

If you plan to feed any form of streaming media to your customers, you'll need to map their locations to optimal NAPs (network access points) and PoPs (points of presence), taking into account both software and hardware. Business data must be protected, and security requires not only money but throughput. And the headaches don't stop at server and network performance, local redundancy or service-side disaster recovery, either. You have to worry about multiple serving sites--especially if you're international.

All these complexities present CTOs and IT managers with a serious dilemma: how to do it right, but get to market while they're still relatively young.