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.

Tibco Beefs up Business Events Processing Wares

Pretty much any of the established companies in the CEP space are worth a look, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink.

But it’s often tough to say whether one company’s product is truly faster or more scalable than another without knowing, for example, what kind of events are being processed, he added: “Are they all inside a network? Are they distributed far and wide? It it one proprietary system, or spread across a heterogeneous environment?”

Read more at: PCWorld

Filling Holes in the SOA Stack with Runtime Governance

ZapThink considers runtime SOA governance a requirement of successful SOA, greatly increasing the chances that the SOA implementation will have business value. Indeed, the lack of adequate runtime SOA governance greatly reduces the chances of success. The ability to create and monitor policies, manage performance, secure the system, and provide self-healing mechanisms means the SOA implementation will provide ongoing value through productivity benefits.

However, most SOA stack vendors do not address many of the key requirements of SOA, including solution patterns around runtime SOA goverance. Considering this limitation, it’s important to address these issues with the proper technology, leveraged in the proper way. Thus, the purpose of this paper.

SLA management latest entry in Tibco’s SOA portfolio

This is a reality with which users must come to grips, according to Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

“Loose coupling as a whole makes the management and usage planning a lot more difficult, but that’s the price you pay for variability,” he said. “You can’t have variability and flexibility without the need to manage and respond to changes. So, management, quality and governance all have to greatly increase their ability to deal with unpredictable changes without (the currently predictable) failure. So, the whole idea of SLA management changes when you move to systems that are flexible and variable. This is not even SOA specific.”

Schmelzer said the move into service management makes sense for Tibco, noting that most SOA platform vendors are looking to branch into this area.

“We see that Management is a core part of the Governance-Quality-Management (GQM) trifecta for SOA, which is the real infrastructure of necessity for SOA,” he said. “We see the ESB as not particularly necessary to run successful SOA for a number of reasons, but on the other hand, we see GQM as an absolutely necessary part of the SOA infrastructure for a few reasons. The idea of loose coupling is that users anywhere can create and consume services at their sole demand. That means there’s a high potential for chaos. To reign in runtime and design time chaos, governance imposes policies and controls. To make sure that the system continues to operate as planned, quality solutions continuously test and verify the system. To make sure the system continues to respond to changing requests, management solutions continuously monitor and intermediate service requests to guarantee operations.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

SCA and SDO standards

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a specification that describes a model for building applications and systems using the core notions of SOA. SCA encourages an organization of business application code based upon components that implement business logic, which offer their capabilities through service-oriented interfaces and which consume functions offered by other components through service-oriented interfaces, called service references.

When building SCA components, you need to move through two major steps. First, the implementation of service components provides services, as well as consumes other services. Second, the assembly of sets of components to build business applications, through the wiring of service references to services.

Read more at: SearchSOA

David S. Linthicum: Reference Models and Architectures

Those who implement SOA have become a bit confused about the notions of SOA reference models and SOA reference architectures. Moreover, there is confusion about how they work with the more traditional concept of enterprise architecture, including all of the management and development disciplines behind EA.

So, if you’re confused, you’re not alone. There are many definitions for the concepts of SOA reference models and SOA reference architectures that are now being defined by guys like me (my models are correct, as always), standards organizations such as OASIS and the Open Group, and vendors such as IBM, Oracle, BEA and TIBCO. Sometimes they align; most of the time they do not.

Read more at: SD Times

SOA Implementation Best Practices

The role of SOA is to provide an architectural approach that supports an organization’s ability to support ongoing business change in the face of a heterogeneous environment. However, since SOA does not introduce a new programming language or runtime environment, organizations must implement code that underpins and exposes a Service interface somehow. Since implementation matters to computers as much as architecture matters to people, it makes sense to consider the runtime environment of the implementation to be a good place to coordinate Service interactions.

When looking at the technology buying patterns in the world of SOA, there is one common thread. The influence of the larger SOA vendors is very much a force in the market today. Within this context, and given continued consolidation, confusion, and change in the SOA marketplace, organizations should make a careful evaluation of the various vendor offerings that support SOA implementations. The consolidation of SOA implementation capabilities has yielded a collection of vendors offering the new solution stack: the “SOA Platform”.

When comparing vendors, it is important to verify how their products and services address both parts of the lifecycle. If the vendor’s own products or services address the full lifecycle, what is their strategy for interoperating with other vendors whose products or services fill the gap? Are vendor platforms just an amalgam of acquired, partnered, and separately developed technologies, or do they represent a cohesive collection of agile SOA infrastructure that supports the widest range of SOA capabilities? This report aims to identify SOA platform vendors and help make the evaluation using the above criteria.

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