Infosys | Microsoft

This is a tricky question because in reality we are comparing apples to oranges here. Silverlight is a powerful but open ended platform, whereas Xcelsius is well tailored BI dashboarding toolkit with a specific user group as the target market. So there are inherent strengths and weaknesses.

But for any BI development team looking at picking a broad direction, I would like to share some factors to consider:

 Silverlight is a free Web plug-in technology. For developers, the Software development kit for the basic development platform is free. For corporations, there are no licensing costs and plug-in install is not an issue beyond first usage.

 But if you decide to purchase Third party Silverlight controls like Infragisitcs or Telerik to reduce custom development and match the quality of UX; your upfront costs may not be significantly different.

 Once acquired, both Silverlight and Xcelsius do not have any royalty type accruing costs.

Most of the costs related to owning and developing using these technologies is related to skill base needed for building the front end. 

Silverlight being a pure technical platform requires a strong developer with good design and programming skills to develop the front end, in addition to a business analyst to figure out what, where and how to display the business intelligence data. 

Xcelsius is a simple, drag and drop based software and so is very easy (and so popular) tool amongst Business analysts. From pure front end development costs point of view, it is possible to save the entire software developer related costs. The Xcelsius tool is simple and intuitive. Business analysts have been able to build compelling interfaces without any developer involvement.

Bottom-line, Xcelsius install and adoption are less technically challenging compared to adoption Silverlight platform or Silverlight based BI control kits.

Silverlight is a very strong platform when it comes to building appealing and engaging Rich Interactive Applications.  It is extremely flexible and allows use of Themes and Custom styles to implement very good branding consistency across all UI elements.

As more and more custom controls become available, delivering high quality user interfaces with Silverlight will become easier and less time consuming.

With Xcelsius, the work needed to develop custom UI controls is already done, and that to on a far more stable platform – Flash. But since some design decisions have already been made, it restricts the overall flexibility you have going forward. It is possible to further customize or extend the Xcelsius tool kit using the Xcelsius SDK but Flex skill set is harder to find than .NET skill set.

If customization or extension of Xcelsius in not an option, then the dashboard designer has to live within the limitations of the available set of Xcelsius UI controls. Bottom-line, Xcelsius is impressive and adequate but has limitations if extension is not an option. Silverlight is very flexible and extensible but needs more time and custom development.

Xcelsius comes with an easy drag-and drop type designer that allows rapid UI front development capability within very short time. Also, since a trained Business Analyst can build the UI, the efforts and time needed to communicate and collaborate with User Interface developer is not needed.

With Silverlight, certain due diligence around application architecture, UI customization and themes development requires investment of time.  It is easy to use these across projects, but if requirements are unclear /evolving; changes are more time consuming with Silverlight.

 Silverlight is a Web based plug-in technology. Although it is platform independent, Silverlight based dashboards need to be disseminated through web browser.  This usually means additional investment in Portal or intranet application with adequate role based security.   Xcelsius gives more dissemination flexibility; flash files can be hosted on web, but can also be distributed through Word / PDF documents and can also be passed around through PowerPoint presentations.

To sum it up, for short duration, quick data visualization requirements where reaching out and working with IT is not an option, Xcelsius is a better option. For longer term investments with IT involvement and enterprise level scalability needs, Silverlight is a better option.