SAP Joined By Tech Giants In Business-Automation Push

“Bringing several major vendors together to agree to a single product approach to SOA is good for customers, because it will help make the interoperability promise of the services underlying the architecture a reality,” Jason Bloomberg, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said. “Broadly, this announcement is a signal that SOA is maturing, as incumbent vendors jump into the fray with both feet.”

Read more at: TechWeb

AmberPoint touts graphics in SOA management pack

AmberPoint is attempting to leverage its user interface capabilities as an advantage, an analyst said.

“In AmberPoint’s case, their user interface, in particular their enhanced SOA dashboard and visualization capabilities, are leading the pack,” said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at ZapThink.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Together On-Screen

“With a rich-client application, a sales guy can decide to link a client record with another piece of information and link that to an application that’s docked on my desktop, and suddenly they all work together,” says Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass.

Read more at: ComputerWorld

Enriched Experience

When used within a company, rich clients can integrate multiple applications for employees, offering a composite view from different sources. Those views can be tailored to individual users or groups. Network portals, which are somewhat restrictive, currently perform those tasks. Using a smart client, an employee would receive data and services from a network server, then work with them locally while tapping into the desktop’s processing power. “Rich clients should replace portals,” ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer says.

Read more at: InformationWeek

Laszlo Open-Sources App-Building Platform

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass., called Laszlo’s decision “interesting” but also “somewhat desperate.” Schmelzer said, “The issue is that Macromedia is the real juggernaut here. Their Flex product is going to significantly impact the market for rich client technology, and it’s hard to see how a startup can effectively compete against a company with 98-percent penetration on the desktop and millions of developer customers.”

Schmelzer said open source should not be viewed as a panacea. “Startups now think that open source is the magic bullet that somehow helps them avoid having to effectively sell and market their product. There are two fallacies with this thought. First, that open source means free. If it’s free, then open source by definition isn’t a business model. If it’s not free, then you still have to sell it. Second, why would a developer want to put their time and effort into developing a Flash-based application that has a limited market when you can spend the same amount of time developing on top of a platform that already has millions of users?

“Fundamentally, Laszlo will have to compete directly with Macromedia for Flash-based rich clients. They only way they can survive is to produce a well-differentiated value proposition for both end-user customers and developers. Open source doesn’t do anything to help that value proposition.”

Read more at: eWeek

Improve the Effectiveness of Enterprise Applications

“There is a major industry-wide push toward the use of service-oriented architectures [SOA] and rich clients as a way of delivering more effective experiences to enterprise customers,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC. “Macromedia Flex perfectly encapsulates the kind of solution that enables enterprise developers to use their existing tools and architecture to bring a more intuitive, compelling user experience to online applications.”

Read more at: Java Pro

Today’s Portals "Inadequate" for Web Services

A stunning report from web services analysts Zapthink predicts that today’s web-based portals, even those that use Java rather than Open Source technologies, will prove “wholly inadequate” to meet the needs of emerging standards-based, loosely coupled, distributed applications.

The solution, Zapthink’s research says, will come from “rich clients” that will allow portal users to customize their UIs and even their workflow and application access.

Bottom Line: The key to effectively upgrading today’s portal technology is to let all this user customization happen at the front end — without requiring any server side developers to change a thing at their end, Zapthink thinks. And today’s portals just aren’t there yet.

“What we’ve realized is that the portal as the primary interface to complex applications in the enterprise will become more and more obsolete,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink of Waltham, Mass. told IDN. “It sounds a bit like heresy, but the web-based portal does not really make a very effective interface to functionality that resides in many systems”

Read more at: Integration Developer News

Terra Payments moves off browser, onto Flex

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with Massachusetts-based ZapThink LLC, said Macromedia is going after a new wave of thinking . “What if application functionality could reside on a server just as it would if it was a web application?

“Instead of using your browser you would use something like Flex, which is based on (Macromedia) Flash. In effect, Flash becomes the new kind of browser for this kind of rich interface,” said Schmelzer.

Once people realize you can accomplish tasks you just can’t accomplish with browsers and portals, levels in demand will start to change, he added.

“Why should you have to go to the Amazon Web site to look at books when you can have a Flash-based Amazon app that is a click away in your desktop? Or why go to the eBay site to check the status of an auction when you can have an eBay app that sits on your desktop that is constantly aware of things?”

Read more at: IT Business (Canada)

The Rich Client: The New Interface for the Next Generation of Distributed Computing

Companies originally moved to adopt standards-based technologies like those underlying the Web and the Internet as a way to achieve distributed computing functionality at a very low total cost of ownership. However, these companies had to forego many of the user interface and productivity advantages that other distributed computing methods, such as traditional client/server applications, used to give them. As a result, companies continue to struggle to address the issue of how to realize the benefits of rich clients in conjunction with the benefits of distributed, low-cost applications.

While companies have long delivered application functionality to Webbrowsers, users are now coming to expect increasingly greater interactivity from this presentation tier. They are demanding a set of rich user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. Businesses today want to gain the operational and cost advantages of Internet and Web Services technologies, but don’t want the limitations that Web browsers impose on user interfaces.

To address these challenges, Macromedia introduces its Flex product aimed at providing rich client capabilities. Macromedia was one of the early pioneers in rich user interaction across the Internet. In 1997, they made a splash in the market with their Flash product, and as of the date of this report, over 98% of Web browsers and 500 million users are equipped with the Macromedia Flash player. Continuing this legacy, Macromedia has introduced its Flex product that leverages Flash to provide rich client capabilities over standards-based, loosely coupled distributed computing infrastructures.

Macromedia Flex Now Available; New Server Solution Set to Radically Improve the Effectiveness of Enterprise Applications

There is a major industry-wide push toward the use of service-oriented architectures and rich clients as a way of delivering more effective experiences to enterprise customers, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst, ZapThink, LLC. Macromedia Flex perfectly encapsulates the kind of solution that enables enterprise developers to use their existing tools and architecture to bring a more intuitive, compelling user experience to online applications.

Read more at: TMCNet