Hello. By way of introduction, my name is Richard Treadway and I have been helping Curl with their plans to introduce the Curl RIA platform in the US market since November 2006. My background is mostly in product development and strategic marketing having helped define and deliver products at Digital Equipment Corp., SCO, BEA and AvantGo.
My first reaction to the problem of introducing Curl to the US market was - "OK- this won't be easy." We all know that getting adoption of a new language is a "long and winding road." But there is evidence that special purpose languages can make it to mainstream status through viral effects especially if they solve a real need. PHP (#5) and Ruby (#10) are good examples. Both are in the top 10 as measured by TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2007 .
Curl affords an interesting opportunity in this regard. It was designed from the beginning by some very smart engineers at MIT specifically for solving the problems that RIA requires. However, back in 1998 no one had any idea of RIA or the web as an application platform. Those were the days of Web1.0 when web interfaces were simple and clunky but who cared. So Curl suffered through the dot-com boom years and finally was acquired by Sumisho Computer Systems (SCS) in 2004.
Over the last 3 years SCS has successfully marketed Curl in the Japanese market. In Japan there are over 300 enterprise class customers who use Curl in business critical applications.
For the last 6 months I have had the opportunity to travel to Japan and meet with many of these customers and get a deep understanding of how Rich Internet Applications are being used in the enterprise. I learned first hand how these customers decided RIA was important and how they measure success of their investments. Curl's customers include large enterprises like Panasonic, Toyota and SONY. In fact Curl is one of the very few RIA technologies in use in real business critical enterprise applications.
Over the next several months I will be writing about RIA in the Enterprise. Some of the topics I intend to cover include:
- Enterprise use cases
- Enterprise application characteristics
- RIA technologies for enterprise apps
- How enterprises are measuring RIA benefits
- How enterprise RIA in effecting the workspace
Curl's deployments in Japan offer a unique opportunity to study RIA in the enterprise and I look forward to sharing the results of my exploration with you all.
Richard