What ever happened to the withering RIA market?

Traditional market research focuses on the size and growth of well-defined market segments. As vendors enter and compete in those markets, customers participate by purchasing products and services within those segments, and market research seeks to establish the patterns of such transactions in order to predict the future trends for such markets.

In the information technology (IT) space, however, many markets are transitory in that as new technologies and behavior patterns emerge, what might formerly have been separate markets vying for customer dollars merge into a single market in order to address evolving customer needs. Over time these separately identifiable markets lose their distinct identity, as products and customer demand both mature. The Rich Internet Application (RIA) market is certainly no exception to this pattern of market behavior.

Read more at: ZDNet Blog

The Dissolution of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) Market

Traditional market research focuses on the size and growth of well-defined market segments. As vendors enter and compete in those markets, customers participate by purchasing products and services within those segments, and market research seeks to establish the patterns of such transactions in order to predict the future trends for …

Data Access for RIAs

ZapThink just produced a good report on the state of Web 2.0 tools entitled “Evolution of the Rich Internet Applcation Market.”
In the report, Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink highlight a critical gap in most RIA solutions: the inability to access data from within the UI. They then point to this as a major source of competitive advantage for Adobe:

“Adobe stands alone as the only vendor who offers a commercial, RIA-specific data access product.”

It is probably not completely fair to expect Zapthink to include in last week’s report a product that was released last week, this is exactly the problem that WaveMaker 5 solves with Enterprise-ready Data Widgets.

Read more at: Sys-Con

ZapThink: Rich Internet Application Environment Market Consolidating

Gap Widens between the Vision and Execution of Rich Internet Applications in the Enterprise. Adobe and Microsoft Dominate; Open Source Vendors Round Out Market

Baltimore, MD (PRunderground) May 06, 2009 — ZapThink released a report today showing that as the Rich Internet Application (RIA) market grows, it increasingly overlaps other, more mature markets, including portals, business intelligence, application modernization, and a range of nascent Service consumer markets, including Enterprise Mashups. As a result, while the RIA market should continue to grow for the next few years, it will most likely merge with other markets long term. This convergence has a significant impact in how the enterprise consumes RIA technologies.

“There is increasing demand for RIA capabilities in the enterprise, although people don’t identify the applications that leverage such capabilities as RIAs,” said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner and Senior Analyst with ZapThink. “Rather, RIA capabilities are features of many of those applications.”

ZapThink further showed that Rich Internet Application market has largely consolidated, with Adobe Systems’ AIR and Flex offerings, and Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and associated Expression Suite tools. Even though these two vendors dominate market share and aggressively compete for license revenue, there are an increasing range of free and open source tools offered by a number of smaller vendors that give developers a range of options.

Key findings of the report include:

• ZapThink estimates that the total market for RIA environments and components will grow to over $700M by 2011.
• Adobe is currently the biggest and most experienced RIA player, but it faces serious challenges on multiple fronts, most notably open source solutions and Microsoft, with its relatively new Silverlight technology.
• Since 2006, ZapThink has seen substantial contraction in the RIA component submarket, elimination of the extensions submarket, and consolidation and expansion of the RIA environments submarket.
• As the line between browser-based and desktop-based applications blurs, and as approaches for abstracting functionality and information from user interfaces develop, other markets will eventually merge with the RIA market.

The report, available on ZapThink’s Web site at http://bit.ly/ttxz4, features several firms offering RIA products, including Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE), Backbase, Borland, Curl, Dojo, e-Business Applications, Eclipse Foundation, Ext, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), IBM (NYSE: IBM), ICEsoft, Ideo Technologies, IDV Solutions, Integra SP, JackBe, jQuery, Kapow Technologies, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), MooTools, Mozilla, MySpace, Nexaweb, Nitobi, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), OpenLaszlo, Prototype, Rico, SAP (NYSE: SAP), Scriptalicious, Social Thing, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), TIBCO (NASDAQ: TIBX), TweetDeck, twhirl, Twitter, Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), Zapatec, and ZK.

Read more at: ZapThink press release

Evolution of the Rich Internet Application Market

As the Internet continues to penetrate every aspect of our lives, both business and personal, the distinction between “Internet application” and “application” increasingly fades from view. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) operate in the sweet spot among richness of Internet capability, richness of user interactivity, and richness of client-side computing capability. RIAs act as Service consumers as part of Service-Oriented Architecture implementations and enable Enterprise Mashups.

Since ZapThink first covered the space in 2002, the RIA market has matured considerably, establishing two core submarkets: RIA environments and RIA components. Adobe Systems emerging as a leader in the RIA environments submarket with their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex products. Microsoft is a strong contender with their newer Silverlight technology. Open source vendors have emerged as significant players, and form a large portion of the RIA components submarket.

While the RIA market should continue to grow for the next few years, it will most likely merge with other markets long term and be indifferentiable from a market sizing perspective as the RIA category increasingly overlaps with other existing desktop and Internet application categories.

Movin’ on up

“Flash is consumed by 98% of Internet browsers,” said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. It’s not that other RIA development frameworks don’t work, he said. “But at this point there is just much more Flash.”

ZapThink’s Schmelzer also argued that “Flex is appealing to developers,” noting while Flash originated in the design world, Flex did not. Adobe acquired Flex when it bought Macromedia in 2005, and “Macromedia had roots in the development world,” Schmelzer said, citing the company’s ColdFusion offering, a programming language for creating dynamic Web pages.

Read more at: SD Times

Running on AIR: 10 great office apps you can grab right now

“What’s curious is that the mainstream population hasn’t fully latched onto the AIR concept quite yet,” said Ronald Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “There aren’t as many AIR-based enterprise applications as there should be. Perhaps it’s just the complexities of introducing a new language, as well as a development paradigm. Adobe has huge in-roads with the creative part, but not as much with enterprise application developers.”

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Adobe readying new mashup tool for business users

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, largely echoed Gourley. “If there’s any company that can do the lightweight enterprise mashup thing credibly, it’s Adobe,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The challenges they face to their vision are mostly focused around governance and security.”

Read more at: IT World

Adobe AIR is out. Let’s talk about security.

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink, expressed his concerns with the ability of existing anti-virus tools to protect against rogue Adobe AIR applications in an October 2, 2007, InfoWorld article:

” ‘The current generation of spyware, virus, and malware [detection] products have no visibility into running AIR programs,’ Schmelzer wrote in an e-mail. ‘As such, there is a high possibility for malicious AIR applications — which are no longer security-restricted to the browser sandbox and are free to manipulate local machines — to spread into the wild.’ ”

Read more at: Internet Storm Center

CMP’s Intelligent Enterprise Announces 2008 Editors’ Choice Winners, Showing Exceptional Vision, Innovation and Leadership

CMP’s Intelligent
Enterprise (http://www.intelligententerprise.com) today announced the results of
its 2008 Editors’ Choice Awards. The editors chose 48 companies that
provide exceptional vision, technology innovation and customer leadership
in attaining strategic objectives.

Award selection collaborators included:David Linthicum, Zapthink

Read more at: CMP