Microsoft Releases BizTalk Server 2010 to Manufacturers

We see enterprises focusing less on new middleware investment and more on reuse/shared services and cloud activities.

Baydin: Email & Collaboration Productivity Enhancer

Baydin (www.baydin.com) targets the information overload problem so prevalent in organizations today by helping individuals manage the information in their email inboxes and on their corporate portals.

Is there a Future for Enterprise Software?

The conversation about the role and future of enterprise software is a continuous undercurrent in the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) conversation. Indeed, ZapThink’s been talking about the future of enterprise software in one way or another for years. So, why bother bringing up this topic …

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 …

Microsoft details Windows Azure on-demand pricing

“Microsoft’s pricing for Azure is competitive without being predatory, at least for now,” said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner at ZapThink. “As competition in any market heats up, you’d expect prices to drop. Whether Microsoft, Google and/or Amazon will enter a price war with the intent of driving each other or smaller players out of the business remains to be seen.”

Microsoft’s key challenge will be building trust around Azure, Bloomberg said. “There are already serious questions about the reliability and confidentiality of cloud computing in general, but add that to the general mistrust of Microsoft we saw with .NET My Services, and later with the Connected Systems Framework [now Connected Services Framework], and they already have two strikes against them.”

Read more at: SD Times

SOA: Integration vs. Business Process?

At the Integration Consortium’s recent Global Integration Summit, I sat next to a fellow at lunch who had been in the integration business his entire career. He began his career hand-coding integrations to IBM mainframes, and over the next twenty years, had connected one system to another using sockets, …

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.

Progress Software Names New CEO

Overall, Progress “has quite a few good assets in the SOA and integration markets,” said ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer via e-mail. “However, they are in many ways a second-tier vendor competing against the much more entrenched incumbents: IBM, Oracle, Software AG, HP and Microsoft.”

Market consolidation, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA, has further cemented the position of the incumbents, Schmelzer added.

But this in turn “makes Progress continue to be a good second choice when end-users aren’t first considering their existing incumbent vendors,” he said. “Without Progress itself getting acquired by one of the ‘big guys,’ I don’t see how this dynamic will change.”

Read more at: PC World