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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.

HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., said the SOA Manager/Systinet combination “brings together design time and runtime SOA governance in a single integrated lifecycle, essentially providing closed-loop SOA governance.”

The public availability of the GIF specification is the other important part of the HP governance announcement today, Bloomberg said. “The GIF news is important because it will help drive long-needed interoperability in the industry among a wide variety of SOA-related offerings.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

The Merging of SOA and Web 2.0

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, said mashups complement SOA. “You’re getting capabilities or functionality from a Web application and combining it with another capability, and mashups are made a heck of a lot simpler if they’re made of services that are service-oriented,” Schmelzer said. “It’s also a plus because of the user interaction.”

The new Web 2.0-enabled enterprise is sort of “like the long-tail approach–there is more opportunity in catering to a mass of niches than a niche of masses,” Schmelzer said. Enterprises can use Web 2.0 and SOA to enable line-of-business staff to create hundreds of applications that will benefit many in their organizations. “The downside to all this freedom is the control,” Schmelzer said. “The problem is, if you build all these services, how do you prevent people from doing harm?”

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, said SOA is not about connecting things but, rather, enabling business processes and continual change. The goal is to allow users to build applications out of services, Bloomberg said. “We’re really talking about service automation,” Bloomberg said. “Service-oriented business applications [SOBAs] are composite applications [made up] of services that implement a business process.”

SOA puts greater power into the hands of the business user, and “SOBAs are most appropriate when the business requires exceptional flexibility,” Bloomberg said. “What’s happening now in the SOA world is we’re reaching the services tipping point–from a focus on building services to consuming services. This has given rise to the mashup. A mashup is a flexible composition of services within a rich user interface environment.”

Governance is key to the enterprise mashup, Bloomberg said. Without it, mashups are dangerous. “Without SOA, mashups are toys,” he said. “Some business users will build mashups as tools mature. The tools are still too technical. There will be an expanding role for business analysts, but for now IT will do the mashing up for the business. The majority of business users will not do any applications.”

Read more at: eWeek

SOA And AJAX Power Panel

Commentators Outline the Present and Future of SOA and AJAX

With Jason Bloomberg as guest.

Read more at: SYS-CON.TV

AJAX On the Minds of Power Bloggers on SYS-CON.TV

What was originally conceived as a SOA Bloggers Power Panel turned into a wide-ranging discussion that involved numerous front-end, AJAX-based issues, in a dynamic discussion produced by SYS-CON.TV at the Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square in New York.

Panel members included SOA World Editor-in-Chief Sean Rhody, ColdFusion Developer’s Journal Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith, noted open-source blogger and IONA Technologies executive Debbie Moynihan, Nexaweb Founder and CTO Coach Wei–all well-known SYS-CON bloggers–and noted indusry commentator and analyst Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink. The panel was moderated by SYS-CON.TV founder and host Roger Strukhoff.

Bloomberg (pictured), whose company has been named media sponsor of SYS-CON’s upcoming SOA World 2007 Conference & Expo, confirmed that oftentimes SOA discussions wander into AJAX territory and vice versa. Horwith, who has been working with ColdFusion for 12 years, noted that he gets involved with a lot of federal government business, and that government clients are now very serious about their AJAX strategies, as usability and accessibility are two of their prime

Read more at: SYS-CON

Slides from Practical SOA for Government Event

Presentation materials from the ZapThink Practical SOA for Government Event. Materials include presentations from:
Ronald Schmelzer — ZapThink,
David Linthicum – Linthicum Group,
David McFarlane – Nexaweb, and
Jim Mackay – iTKO.

Nexaweb to Showcase Enterprise Web 2.0 Solutions at ZapThink’s SOA for Government Seminar

“Seeing Federal agencies grapple with the need to assess and deploy SOA approaches that provide value, meet their unique needs, and offer a manageable architecture going forward, led us to the development of this seminar,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst for ZapThink. “Paramount to successful SOA implementations is learning how to extend service-oriented, composite applications to end users. This seminar is designed to guide attendees through concepts, business issues and technologies that demonstrate how an SOA works within an organization and the best Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions for their organization.”

Read more at: SYS-Con

RIA meets SOA

“AJAX wasn’t invented, it was discovered and as such it brings with it the pros and cons of JavaScript and XML,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink in Uxbridge, MA. Developers must wrestle with the differences between JavaScript implementations on different browsers as well as having to support various schemas and capabilities exposed by servers. “Without SOA, AJAX is just the next generation of JavaScript,” says Bloomberg, “it just allows you to come up with new ways to do drag and drop.”

Read more at: {softwaredeveloper}.com