The ROI of RIAs

In recent months, a new class of enterprise application has emerged to help increase productivity, accelerate decision-making, reduce costs and enhance the user experience: welcome to the world of rich internet applications (RIAs).

As more businesses recognize these benefits, RIAs will become increasingly common in enterprise deployments. A strategy report by Info-Tech Research Group on the business case for RIAs concludes that “soon the choice will not be whether to roll out an RIA, but rather what type to roll out”. Furthermore, RIA technology has evolved significantly over the past year, opening up a new opportunity for businesses to realize ROI in short period of time.

The Adobe Flash Platform enables enterprises to join the RIA trend quickly by deploying the technology in a stepwise approach, gradually enhancing existing infrastructure and systems with RIAs (or even regular web applications) that can be rapidly and affordably developed.

By deploying RIAs, businesses can unlock tremendous new value from systems that have already been deployed, and create new synergies by connecting isolated components in an enterprise’s infrastructure. They can also create new opportunities for implementing breakthrough systems that weren't previously possible.

Maintaining agility in a dynamic market
For businesses that must adapt to an evolving market place, from large economic swings to smaller customer trends, being able to discern meaningful patterns from inbound data is critical to making good business decisions. Unfortunately, business data is often collected faster than personnel are able to analyze it, and the data is too complex to evaluate without an analytical layer to visualize trends.

Adobe Flash Platform is ideal for developing RIAs and web applications that enable companies and their customers to quickly distill and visualize large and complex data sets, facilitating rapid interpretation and analysis.

One such application, NASDAQ Market Replay, enables investment professionals to distill massive quantities of market data to visualize stock trades and other market events down to a millisecond. This kind of analysis not only assists investment firms with customer support, but also enables them to offer their clients valuable investment insight, as well as more easily ensure their own regulatory compliance. According to Claude Courbois, head of product R&D for NASDAQ, the application would not have been possible without Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, both part of the Adobe Flash Platform.

Similar applications can be equally valuable in internal deployments.  Sharp Electronics deployed an executive "cockpit" application that informs core executives of detailed progress against key company metrics. The application presents data from the company's SAP system in an interactive display available the Sharp executive team, facilitating rapid decisions to emerging market trends.

Discovering new synergies
In addition to unlocking information from existing data, RIAs can create new synergies or integration between multiple databases or systems that have already been deployed.

LMG, a marketing services company, develops and manages large retail-based customer reward programs for retailers and service providers worldwide. The group owns and operates the Nectar brand, the UK’s largest customer reward program. Using Adobe Flash Platform, the company is able to provide applications that overlay Nectar data with their clients’ own customer data, such as sales figures.

Self Serve, one such application, was developed by LMG for its supermarket client Sainsbury. The application allows users to analyze hundreds of millions of transactions made by half of UK households annually. Self Serve provides Sainsbury’s buyers with new insights into customer behavior, helps them identify trends, and enables them to build sophisticated reports that ultimately drive better business decisions for the company.

Meeting the new consumerist benchmark
As business users are exposed to consumer applications in their lives outside the office, their expectations of what is possible are rapidly changing. Consumer applications move forward at an accelerated pace, exposing people to new ways to communicate and consume information.

As expectations rise, business users become more frustrated with the use of business applications and push for more consumer-like user experience in their work environment. Business applications that employ RIA techniques can help users make decisions faster and complete their work more efficiently. They are easier to learn and therefore increase overall productivity sooner.

The Adobe Flash Platform enables the development of highly interactive and expressive interfaces that invite user acceptance and meet these rising expectations. The result is improved adoption and increased ROI for enterprise applications.

Getting to deployment faster
Applications built with the Adobe Flash Platform can often be developed and deployed faster than with other web development technologies. Developers can use pre-built components in Adobe Flex, part of the Adobe Flash Platform, to accelerate project schedules. Claude Courbois, head of product R&D for NASDAQ, reports this practice “sped up development time and reduced costs tremendously” on the company’s Market Replay application.

Since the Adobe Flash Platform is a complete system, it offers efficiencies and synergies unmatched by alternative technologies. The platform enabled Optimal Payments, the online payments processer, to complete development on their application in half the time and one third the amount of code that would have been required using Ajax or other open source frameworks.

Development time is also reduced by the cross-platform reach of the Adobe Flash Player. News International, publisher of The Times, The Sun, and other international periodicals, deployed a Flash-based application to coordinate the commissioning of freelance content across newspaper and magazine titles. Because the application could run on multiple platforms, including different browsers (Safari, Internet, Explorer, Firefox) and desktops (Mac and PC), the company could develop once and deploy to their diverse user audience without needing to develop multiple versions of the application. Additionally, with the development skills the developer teams had from building SAP, Java, and web-based applications, they were able to learn Adobe Flex without any organized training.

Choosing the right technology
The flexibility, reach, and completeness of the Adobe Flash Platform make it the ideal solution for building RIAs and web applications, particularly when integration or enhancement of existing systems is desired. In a recent Gartner Research MarketScope report released in late 2008 reviewing RIA technologies, Adobe received a "Strong Positive" rating, the highest rating for the report.

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For more information on the business benefits of RIAs and the Adobe Flash Platform, download a free PDF at www.FlashForBiz.com.