Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are about a lot more than dazzling interfaces for consumer web sites. Don’t get me wrong - consumer sites that offer purchase recommendations, dynamic shopping carts, streaming video, photo editing, etc. are great - amazing actually!
But what excites me is when RIAs are used in the enterprise space. When designed and applied appropriately, they become synonymous with improved business processes.
By RIAs, I mean web applications with the features, functionality and responsiveness of traditional desktop software. These can be implemented using a variety of asynchronous technologies including JavaScript/AJAX, Flex, Java and Silverlight. Clearly, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications would be hard-pressed to exist without some form of RIA.
For enterprise SaaS, RIAs can offer role-based and process-oriented front ends to the internal business systems and workflows of a complex organization. They close the gap between the native performance / look & feel of on-premise enterprise software and SaaS deployments that can be accessed anytime and anywhere.
‘Enterprise RIAs’ typically need to handle very large data sets, scale to service thousands of users, and deal with complex business logic that encompasses many functional elements and scores to hundreds of screens. This is the scale and complexity you’d expect to find in large, transactional applications, such as credit card services, logistics processing, payroll, or large commerce sites.
Designing an enterprise RIA is of course, significantly different then designing a consumer RIA. It is not necessarily a matter of better engineering or more innovation (although that is what we strive for!). But consumer applications generally do not pull data from multiple applications, do not require development of hundreds of inter-related screens, nor so thoroughly encapsulate improved business processes. Because of this complexity, any strategy for implementing enterprise RIAs in a SaaS, needs to focus on real business goals, cover the full SaaS life cycle, and clearly outline how existing back-end systems and RIAs will work together to make it easier and more intuitive for users to accomplish high value tasks.