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!

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.

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.