Recently I read in a blog that the Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013. The post also mentions the hurdles in adopting Web 2.0 technologies by the large companies. The article said:
For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:
- I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as "consumer-grade" technology
- Ad-supported web tools generally have "free" as the starting point
- Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments
As I have said before, the fastest way for Web 2.0 adoption will be via RIA (rather than the more popular ones such as wikis, blogs, tags, mashups, and social networks). RIA is the low hanging fruit where users get an enriched experience compared to the client-server implementations of yesteryears. The TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership) of RIA is also compelling.
Why do I say this?
Let me give you five examples of "actual RIA applications in use" by very large global companies using Curl RIA platform. This follows my post few weeks ago on the key requirements for enterprise RIA.
Example 1 - Voice of the Engineers (VOE) - Large electronics manufacturer built a real time application to link the field input to parts repair information. This application provides rich graphical interface to visualize suspected points of failure. Executives can also get aggregate information on failure trends over time (classic BI). Benefits are quantified in several hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost saving in the first year of implementation.
Example 2 - Heatmaps - Significant company in the GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) space offers a Curl-based RIA to its customers. Grid-like UI offers a view of various business units that pass or fail compliance. They call this the Heatmap. As you mouse over to the red cell (showing compliance failure), further details are revealed as to why. The company claims this specific visualization is the big competitive differentiation for them. They are growing briskly at 40% year to year in this space.
Example 3 - Procurement - A large international company (household name) in the electronics manufacturing business built a procurement system using Curl front-end technology with Oracle DBMS and J2EE backend. The systems has been in operation or 3 years with over 300 users. Very large data volumes with fast performance was the key need. Benefits are quantified as 50% reduction in cycle time compared to the same under the legacy client-server system.
Example 4 - Consolidated Billing - Large telecommunications company built a consolidated billing system (for landline, VOIP, long distance, cell phone) for corporate clients. The old system was built using Visual Basic and bills were sent via CD's causing delay in data upload and services. The new system uses Curl in the client-side and Oracle in the backend. Currently 10,000 clients use the system, likely to grow to 15,000 next year. The entire application was developed within a year on a budget of $1M. Benefits include 10% in cost savings with increased accuracy of data.
Example 5 - Insurance planning for agency - Large insurance company offers this web-based application for agents. It can simulate customer's financial's, trying various policies of the plan and provides visual results with graphical charts for easy understanding. This new Curl-based system replaced the old Visual Basic system. The client states the benefits as: easy maintainability, better security, better performance and no data latency.
There are many more such examples from Curl's 300 plus large enterprise clients.
Hence we humbly claim Curl to be the defacto leader in Enterprise RIA space.
