Archive for 2007

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What 2008 May Bring

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

As the year comes to a close, it’s always an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened in the past 12 months and to look at what’s on the horizon.

This past year was an active one, with major shifts in a number of areas. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which have been on the radar since 2002, finally started to garner attention and gain traction with organizations. Major announcements from technology leaders like Adobe, Microsoft and Curl have made friendly and stable development technologies available. As well, consumers have responded positively to early applications making RIAs a viable next step, even for enterprises.

Software as a Service (SaaS), has also made significant in-roads this year and is stacking up to be a “technology to watch” for 2008. The concept of loosely coupled technologies behind the scenes, some of which are delivered as services, is a smart model that provides organizations with the economies of scale to be competitive and the flexibility to grow.

For 2008, I’m looking forward to seeing new versions of Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight. Both of which seem to be promising technology to keep an eye on. It will also be interesting to see what happens with AJAX and Java in this mix too.

Finally, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen with the mobile industry. For years now it’s been ready to explode. Maybe 2008 is the year?

We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year!

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New Public Betas of Adobe Flex and AIR

Thursday, December 13th, 2007

Today, Adobe released the Beta 3 versions of both Adobe Flex and AIR. You may ask “Why should I care about beta software”? Well, both of these applications will be impactful if you are building, or considering building, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). While not the only solution on the market, Flex is one of the most widely used technologies for enterprises RIAs.

What makes this release interesting? It delivers:

  • Great tools for data aggregation and for visually presenting metrics that will contribute to decision making.
  • More freedom for end-users to access tools and information without necessarily being connected to the internet.
  • Great economies of scale in creating online and offline applications in from a single effort.

We suspect that this release is a feature-complete version of what we will see in the final on which is anticipated to be available in early February 2008. If you are looking for a copy, it’s available on the Adobe Labs site.

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End Users Prefer SaaS

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

There is an interesting commentary over at The Intelligent Enterprise Blog by David Linthicum, managing partner of Zapthink. This piece is about a recent Datamonitor survey of 300 pharmaceutical and biotech firms across Europe and North America about their attitudes toward software as a service (SaaS). The results showed that the end users of these applications overwhelmingly prefer the SaaS model over more traditional enterprise applications.

Why you may ask? End users cite better quality products, better customer support, and better service as the prime reasons, but David digs further into the real reasons why SaaS is better, including:

  • Users are more accustomed to the web, and spend more time online then they do in their enterprise applications, making it a very familiar experience.
  • Users expect to be able to access their applications from anywhere, home, work, and vacation, and to be productive whenever they want to.
  • SaaS vendors are hungry for business and are ready to provide the stellar service necessary to win clients over and keep them. With SaaS vendors it’s critical to deliver on promises as users can simply unsubscribe if they are not happy.

If end user satisfaction is not enough to convince you that SaaS is a model to consider, then perhaps the fact that Gartner is predicting that 25 percent of new business software will include SaaS by 2011, will be convincing.

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RIAs and the Information Workplace

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

There is an interesting article over at Read/Write Web about Forrester’s prediction that RIAs will replace Microsoft Office and portals on the front-end. Forrester suggests that rich Internet applications (RIAs) may become the new norm for applications used by decision-makers and task-oriented workers, or as they’ve coined them employees in the “Information Workplace (IW)”.

Many of the articles about RIAs have focused on the consumer experience and impact, but the business impact of RIAs is also very significant. Just as the concept of a dashboards, which are used to show senior decision makers a visual status of key performance indicators, made ripples a few years ago, RIA-zing office applications and portals will also cause major waves. RIAs introduce a seamless, individualized, and visual user experience for processing large sums of data, and help make the chore of analyzing information easier.

Companies like BEA and SAP have already seen the light and are working to build new RIA-ized interfaces for their enterprise solutions. Let’s see how many others jump on board after reading this “_blank”>Forrester report.

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Widgets, Widgets Everywhere

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

During the past week, I must have heard the word widget about a dozen times. It seems like every marketing publication and blog has posted something about them lately. What’s most interesting is the broad array of “things” people are referring to when they use the term widget. To some it’s a browser plug-in that pushes data to the user via a web service, while to others, it’s a fully branded desktop application that works in a partially connected world to pull data and update information.

The one thing all marketers can agree on is that widgets, in whichever form they take, are something to keep an eye on. As I wrote in Bye-bye Advertising, Hello Experience Building marketers are looking for new ways to connect with consumers outside of traditional media and are shifting their budgets toward creating branded experiences. Widgets, and branded mini-applications, are a viable way to keep users engaged and active without constantly pushing them to your site. They provide the desktop real estate that marketers crave without relying on a consumer’s browsing habits.

I’m sure the official release of Adobe AIR in 2008 will only make things more confusing, as the line between web applications and desktop applications continues to blur.

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The Tipping Point for SaaS and RIA

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

It’s no longer a secret that Software as a Service (SaaS) is becoming a real industry. In RIA-zation of Office Tools and Adobe Buzzword: It’s the Mac vs MS-DOS Debate All Over Again, I argued that any industry, including the very well established Microsoft Office stronghold, is now prone to a massive takeover by competitors who would:

  • lower technical barriers – i.e. offer software as a service that can be up and running right away without requiring installation and without stumbling over OS or equipment related obstacles along the way
  • lower cognitive barriers – i.e. software that favors instant engagement, that is easy to discover and learn, and that provides a sense of gratification to its users (in my days, this was summarized as “user-friendly software”)

Yesterday, InstaColl, a Bangalore-based company co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia (founder of Hotmail.com), announced an RIA-zied online office suite named Live Documents. Live Documents joined the ranks of Google Docs, Zoho Writer and many others who are discretely nibbling away at the office market. But unlike its competitors who are trying to stay under Microsoft’s radar (or so they claim publicly, politely and politically in every interview or announcement), Live Documents is boldly declaring war against Microsoft Office.

I think this is a “tipping point” day in the history of the industry. SaaS and RIA just came out of the closet.

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Retailers Turn to RIAs

Friday, November 16th, 2007

With the holiday shopping season kicking into full swing in North America, it’s a good time to take a look at the online retail market.

For the first year, analysts are predicting a slowdown in eCommerce growth, which has many retailers anticipating softer results than previous years as they fight for the same pool of clients. Retailers know that they need to entice new clients over from competitors, as well as decrease drop-off from the ones they currently have, to remain competitive in a softer market.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have become a hot topic of conversation as retailers explore ways of differentiating themselves and making the shopping process more engaging for clients. Retailers are embracing rich content, product selection and comparison tools, visual customization tools, and streamlined shopping carts, and they’re seeing strong results.

For a more detailed look at eCommerce and RIAs, read our recent white paper, Enhancing eCommerce ROI through Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

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The Business Case for RIAs is Strong

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

With the arguments put forth in “The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications“, a recent article by Dave Wolf over at Web 2.0 Magazine, it’s hard to understand why any organization wouldn’t quickly opt to embrace RIAs. Wolf presents a very strong case from all perspectives, showing that RIAs have strong staying power, wide-spread industry support, high adoption rates and better end results.

“With RIAs, everyone wins. IT departments enjoy the simplicity of server-based deployments and the cost savings of a dramatically more productive development environment than traditional Web development. End users enjoy a truly rich application user experience that engages them quickly and keeps them engaged longer. Companies can reduce time-to-market of a new innovative solution, and enjoy greater customer loyalty and an increased market presence, which translates to greater revenues. For their business applications, they can ensure users are optimizing productivity by using the tools they have invested in to power their organizational performance.”

As Wolf quotes Bob Dylan, “the times they are a changin’”, and for the better.

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Clearing the Air about Offline Applications

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Last week, Mozilla announced a project called Prism, a newly packaged version of its Webrunner technology from a couple of years ago. Prism lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.

What’s interesting about this announcement is how many industry blogs and media covered it as a solution for offline apps, comparing it to other recently announced solutions like AIR and Silverlight. With all this clouding of messaging, I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few points about offline applications.

Prism does not current support offline, rather it’s a vehicle to access an existing website or web application from the desktop while a user is online. Hopefully Mozilla will choose to release an API for it in the future, making it more of a powerful option. It could theoretically be paired with a technology like Google Gears to create the impression of an offline app.

On a similar note, many posts recently have also lumped Silverlight in the offline apps category, comparing it to AIR. This too is a misconception. Silverlight is more akin to Flash Player than to anything else. Today, with version 1.0 of Silverlight, it cannot run offline. Yes, you can use Javascript in a browser to mimic some offline functions, but it is still isolated from the operating system. Now, Microsoft does note that support for offline functionality will come with version 1.1, but a release date for this has not yet been set.

I hope this helps to clarify a few of the recent misconceptions out there.

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Google Analytics Now Tracks Rich Content

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

The difficult task of generating some meaningful and accurate numbers to justify your investments in rich content on your site has just gotten easier. Google Analytics, a popular website analysis tool amongst small to mid-sized businesses, has just been updated to now track user engagements that include elements common with Web 2.0 services, including Javascript, Ajax and Flash applications, widgets and gadgets, and downloadable pages.

This not only allows companies to better track their website numbers as a whole, it also allows them to offer advertisers alternate numbers to page views for gauging the success of an ad. New figures such as time spent on a page or the length of time an ad is visible may become more valuable to advertisers in the future.

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