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.

Microsoft tries to open much-needed second act

“The real technology isn’t on the computer, it’s on the Net” adds Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink. “In that area, Microsoft hasn’t been firing on all cylinders.”

Now Microsoft is relying on its unfriendly bid for Yahoo to help regain badly needed luster. But some analysts say buying a struggling Internet portal company might not be the best way to achieve the transformation that Microsoft needs.

“Microsoft is seeking a transformative effect in the market,” says Schmelzer. But Yahoo, he adds has been “suffering rather than leading” and might not be the most attractive prey.

He suggests Microsoft might do better by plowing its billions into a social networking site like Facebook that can build buzz instead. Microsoft last year paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, a deal that valued the young company at $15 billion.

“Microsoft’s paradigm was good for the ’80s and ’90s, but it’s a different marketplace now,” Schmelzer says.

“Microsoft is going to have to be rethought,” says Schmelzer. “At Apple, it took a complete culture change to become a multi-technology company. Once the genetics changed, the company started innovating.”

Read more at: MSNBC

Analysis: Yahoo Bid Backfire If Microsoft Can’t Change?

Though Microsoft and Yahoo are different types of companies and the union itself makes much more sense, Ron Schmelzer, analyst and managing partner with Zapthink, likened the deal to Time Warner-AOL, in which AOL’s brand was damaged, not enhanced, after all was said and done.

But investing as much as the gross domestic product of some countries in one company could inspire Microsoft to “change its stripes” and rethink its own interests, he said.

To make the deal a true success, Microsoft also has to prove that it can let go of its entrenched Windows OS and desktop software culture, which had been the anchor keeping Microsoft from moving more quickly against Google and Yahoo in online advertising and services in the first place, Schmelzer said.

“The application itself is moving away from the thing that sits captive on your desktop to the thing that’s distributed on the Internet,” he said. “Microsoft has to rid itself of its ’80s and ’90s perspective — which was great in the ’80s and ’90s, but now 80 percent of the value of the computer is not in the computer itself.”

Read more at: PCWorld

Ballmer: Microsoft’s poor search and ad performance drove Yahoo offer

Microsoft has often been criticised for how slow it’s moved to shed its legacy of desktop software to keep up with the innovations of Web 2.0. The addition of Yahoo could indeed help the company do that, if Microsoft takes full advantage of the deal and uses it to alter its current course, said Ron Schmelzer, analyst and managing partner at Zapthink.

“This has to be transformative across all areas of Microsoft,” he said.

Read more at: ComputerWorld UK

Mashups, SAAS Present Security Risks

There’s no inherent security in SAAS, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “You have to explicitly design that in,” he said. “And by explicit, that means you have to design authentication and authorization into the way that the service responds to consumers. Furthermore, you have to deal with a new bread of denial-of-service attack that can target Service dependencies.”

Mashups, by their nature as a composition of services, don’t introduce new security issues, Schmelzer said.

“The security issue in composition is the problem of security context in which you have to deal with the fact that composing different systems might mean trying to span different identity domains, which is a significant problem for companies that have not made a prior investment in identity management systems,” he said.

That said, the security issue is not a fatal flaw for SAAS, mashups and SOA, Schmelzer said.

“It just needs to be addressed,” he said. “Properly designed SOA, SAAS or mashups can be every bit as secure as any other enterprise application system, which means [they can be] as good as the architects.”

Read more at: eWeek

Big Companies Embracing Software Mashups

Experts say that although enterprise mashups promise to help make software development easier, they also present a new set of challenges. One of the key characteristics of enterprise mashups is that they put more power in the hands of end users. “The average I.T. establishment is reluctant to give users more power,” says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at consulting firm ZapThink. The answer, he says, is for the I.T. department to provide oversight, defining what kinds of mashups are allowed, and then to govern that process. Software and service vendors can help companies implement management tools.

Read more at: CIO Today

Mashups to Re-Map the Legal Tech Market?

“Consumers have been out there doing funky things with their browsers, and we’re calling those things mashups,” says ZapThink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg. “What’s interesting to us about this phenomenon is how mashup capabilities are being used in businesses to leverage services in the context of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). We’re calling those apps enterprise mashups.”

ZapThink views the emergence of Web 2.0 as a natural evolution of the SOA, in which loosely coupled software services provide the business processes. Mashups that meet business needs will require SOA, Bloomberg explains, and the SOA infrastructure is necessary to guarantee the loose coupling. “Without that loose coupling, mashups are little more than toys from an enterprise perspective,” he says.

An SOA provides another critical enterprise component: governance. “Mashups today — what you might call public mashups — are inherently ungoverned,” Bloomberg says. “How many businesses are going to risk allowing their employees to assemble and reassemble business processes with no controls in place to ensure that the resulting apps follow corporate policies? Companies have to worry about privacy rules, Sarbanes Oxley, confidentiality — all these policies that a business user has to follow. There’s no way a company is going to let mashups into the organization unless it can make sure that people are following those kinds of rules.”

Read more at: Law.com Legal Technology

Warning over effect of AJAX on security

“AJAX is a combination of JavaScript and XML. Both have security issues that AJAX helps to facilitate,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink, a Baltimore-based consultancy specialising in XML and Web services.

Read more at: TechWorld

Groove taps app dev

In addition to satisfying the collaborative needs of the development process, deeper collaborative capabilities are needed to address the impact of Web services on development, according to Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink in Waltham, Mass.

“At the enterprise level, software development involves multiple people in different organizations. This is especially true as companies move toward service-oriented architectures and abstract functionality across multiple systems,” Bloomberg said. “You can’t build a services-oriented architecture without collaboration.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

“Google: A trailblazer for Web services?”

“It’s something that’s widely available, in production, and the general public seems to like it,” ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer said. “Google has definitely energized a lot of forces.”

Read more at: ZDNet