The Japanese enterprises have been big users of RIA as I observed after meeting several of them back in 2006 and recently during a trip last June. Here is an example.
A large consumer electronics manufacturing company - a global household name. They started 3 years ago implementing a rich web-based application for the field engineering people. They call it the VOE (Voice of the Engineer) Search system.
They picked Curl over Adobe's Flex as the client-side platform. One of several reasons for this selection was the "agnosticism" of Curl to the back-end. The ecosystem has a full Oracle back-end including the Oracle Application Server in the middle tier. They use Oracle DBMS in one system and .Net SQL Server in another system. Parts and repair data are gathered and aggregated from both systems into another Oracle DBMS. They tried to provide an efficient search platform using Oracle Portal services (remember Web 1.0 euphoria of Portals a few years ago, a form of +poor man's visual integration or lipstick on the pig+!).
The new system using Curl for web-based transactional front-end with complex graphics was developed in 6 months and implemented about two years ago. The users are the field engineers and repair staff. By last summer (1 year after use) the number of users reached 100 and this summer, the number has jumped to 500 all across Japan. During the second half of this year, they will roll it out worldwide and the number this time next year will be in the 1000s of concurrent users. This is an example of a true RIA for the enterprise, deployed inside the firewall, sometimes called B2E (business to employees) applications like CRM.
I asked them about the ROI. The first year saw a saving of $300K in risk money (potential to loose if system was not there). Field engineers can see trends of common defects ahead of time and take corrective action. The complex graphics screens provide varieties of repair trends and such information is fed back to the production quality management team. The system goes through regular extensions. For example, they have added a "bulletin board" for collaborative exchange of information across field staff. This customer believes the VOE is a mission-critical application. Being an RIA deployment, the global roll-out is simpler and much less expensive than if they had done it in the classic client-server model.
Mr. Yamamoto, the chief application architect gave me a "total picture", from Curl front-end to Oracle App. Server and DBMS back-end. They do use Discoverer from Oracle as the BI tool for pre-defined reports and query. But having an RIA on the web platform is their way for the future. Curl gave them the price-performance, scalability, application development productivity, security, and complex graphic functionality. This is a "stateful" application, where "unit of work" integrity must be maintained. As I use to joke, "stateful web application" used to be an oxymoron few years ago.
I will narrate other such examples in future.