Introduction

In the good old days of computing, enterprise applications were built in-house to specific requirements. Packaged applications such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Management) appeared as a new phenomenon during the late 1980s and early 1990s. SAP Software founded by ex-IBMers in Germany started off this trend, which was followed by other vendors like PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards (all part of Oracle now), and Oracle. Besides horizontal applications like ERP and CRM (Customer Record Management), industry specific application packages became popular in the retail, banking, and manufacturing sectors. With the increase in bandwidth and the onset of the Web, these applications came to be delivered as hosted service. SalesForce.com started this trend with its CRM offering followed by other vendors like NetSuite and SugarCRM. Customers liked the lower cost of this SaaS model, as they found the data security and reliability issues acceptable.

During the last few years, much excitement has been created in Web 2.0 – treating the Web as a real platform for developing interactive and transactional applications (not just rendering static Web pages). Most of Web 2.0 deployment has been in the consumer space. It is high time the enterprises started embracing the Web as a platform for modernizing their mission critical applications.

Market Evolution: Enterprise Applications
Figure 1 summarizes the evolution of enterprise software architecture toward RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Fortune 1000 companies, along with many others, spent a lot of resources during the 1980s and 1990s building client and server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows. In this way they were able to move beyond the limited user interface capabilities of the earlier generation of ‘green screen’ character based applications. To enjoy the increased reach and lower TCO that the Web 2.0 technologies make possible, enterprises now need to progress beyond this client and server model to the next evolutionary stage.

Starting with the introduction of the Internet browser in the mid-1990s, the pressure to move applications to the Web has built up steadily, as its advantages in reach and TCO have increased. Responding to this pressure, many enterprises and application vendors implemented Web 1.0 interfaces to substitute for the old client and server applications (Arrow 2) but the loss in usability was often severe. Now many people hope that RIA technologies, like AJAX developed originally for consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications such as Google Maps, can be used to restore the lost usability (Arrow 3), but applications that need to interactively manipulate large data sets and provide complex user interfaces are just too hard to build this way. Many of these applications were too sophisticated to ever make the jump to the Web at all. What they need is an RIA framework powerful enough to support applications with the full richness, interactivity, and performance of native client and server applications (Arrow 4).