Leaders in the Flex community recently gathered at Adobe’s San Francisco headquarters this week. I’ve covered my thoughts to the conversations that went on during those two days. The goal was to discuss Flex and it’s future as an Apache project, but other topics included: HTML5, Adobe’s new corporate strategy, and the future for the Flex community.

Apache is the the future for enterprise class Flex. For those highly skeptical and critical of Adobe, my message to you is this: The move to Apache is a big one and categorically different from anything we’ve seen in the past.

Read the whole blog post here.

Over the past week the Flash and Flex community have been on a roller coaster ride with announcements by Adobe regarding the Flash platform.  As a technical director at Roundarch this is a topic I follow very closely since it directly affects the digital solutions we design and develop for our clients.  I’ve shared my thoughts on Flex and the future of developing rich internet applications in a post on my blog.

I am fortunate to be surrounded with technologists, user experience practitioners, visual designers, and strategists at Roundarch who combined represent expertise in almost all things relevant to modern software development. It’s a lucky spot to be in and I’m confident in our proficiency to adapt both reactively and proactively to trends like this in the industry.

I’ve been involved in the Flex community in some capacity now for over 4 years. Over the past week Adobe has made some major announcements concerning Flash and Flex. Some in the Flex community are clearly livid over what has happened in the past week. I’d like to offer a little perspective on how I came to love Flex and my thoughts on the future of developing rich user interfaces.

Read the whole blog post here.

Whether Adobe represents an aging dinosaur in an online world that is quickly passing them by or a force still to be reckoned with in a battle of giants for control of the world of rich Internet application solutions was the central theme of a panel discussion in which I recently participated at the Pacific Crest 13th Annual Global Technology Leadership Forum, in beautiful Vail, Colorado.  The questions asked of the panelists, all of whom represented digital agencies working in the RIA space, were about what you’d expect:  What kinds of projects do you work on?  Is Adobe more or less relevant to your business than they were a year ago?  When not using Adobe’s tools, what else do you use?  Is HTML 5 going to take over the world?  Since the conference attendees were all institutional investors looking to make portfolio decisions across a wide range of technology stocks, what they really wanted to know, of course, was, “Should I buy?  Should I sell?  Just tell me — what should I do?”

The panelists were, probably not surprisingly, mixed in their assessments of ADBE, but the opinions generally fell in line with the type of work that made up the bread and butter of each of the agencies.  Those who specialized in more consumer-facing applications felt that Adobe, although still obviously leading the pack for designers with their Creative Suite, had become far less relevant than they were a year ago in terms of the importance of the Flash platform.  One agency even reported that whereas Flash development represented 25% of their new business in 2010, NONE of their new business in 2011 was being built with Flash; their customers simply preferred to make the trade off of reduced interactivity in exchange for a technology stack (HTML and JavaScript) that can easily be consumed on the iPad and iPhone.

On the other hand, the agencies like Roundarch that focus more on enterprise deployments where a richly interactive experience is key had a different perspective.  Sure, customers are growing in their level of sophistication and better understand that there is a multiplicity of devices to be supported, but these needs are additive to the work on Adobe platforms, not in lieu of it.  More importantly, however, was the recognition of the compelling story that Adobe is now telling with its Customer Experience Management strategy.  For enterprise customers, the ability to tie together a workflow that starts with conceptual and production design and development with the Creative Suite with solid integration into deployment and ongoing content management using CQ5 and ends (or starts again) with usage statistics and analysis with Omniture is terribly attractive.

Let’s face it — if you’re looking at Adobe’s growth opportunity as being centered around their Creative Suite (a mature market with little growth opportunity if there ever was one) or their revenues related to Flash (meager at best), then they just aren’t that interesting from an investment perspective.  But if you look at them with a slightly wider lens — one that is focused on their having finally put together a strong value proposition for the enterprise market backed by an extremely solid product suite — then the outlook for ADBE is a bit more exciting.

On Thursday June 18th, a Chicago RIA community including the Chicago Flex Users Group and the Chicago Adobe Users Group welcomed the Adobe User Group World Tour that came to demo the latest version of Flex 4. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt presented Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new interaction design tool geared towards rapid creation of rich internet applications, Flex 4, the latest version of Flex, and Flash Builder, Adobe’s new offering for creating RIAs. Flash Catalyst was presented at Ascend training in the afternoon while Flex 4 and Flash builder were demoed at the Roundarch Chicago office in the evening.

Here’s a video of the Flex 4 Flash Builder presentation at Roundarch.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

Left to right: John Peebles of Avis Budget Group, Aman Datta of Roundarch, Ray Picard, Jeff Westover and Ben Kiker of Interwoven.

Aman Data, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, presented Roundarch‘s upcoming redesign of AVIS.com to a group of industry and financial analysts at Interwoven‘s analyst day today in New York.  Avis and Roundarch discussed the Q1 upcoming relaunch of AVIS.com as well as several innovative changes that are being advanced in the market today.  One of the key innovations is the development of an “extra” site experience.  Customers can now perform a full reservation process in a single rich widget.  This widget is currently featured on www.rentacar.com and will be used on many Avis partner sites in the future.  The widget, developed in Adobe Flex, is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market.

These are certainly interesting times. And if you make a living driving innovative web projects like Roundarch, then things just got a whole lot tougher. In the past week, three of my most senior clients cited the Sequoia presentation as an indication of their bearish outlook for the future. Everyone seems to be preparing for the nuclear winter which in many companies will include spending and hiring freezes, layoffs, and a tendency to play it safe rather than make bold strategic moves. At Roundarch, we have believed for quite some time in the transformational nature of rich internet applications, and our clients who have deployed them across the enterprise have achieved outsized gains vis a vis their competitors. Is it still possible to create competitive differentiation using rich internet applications in these difficult times? We think so. Two quick facts: the iPod was launched shortly after 9/11 and Fortune Magazine was launched in 1932. We believe that turbulent economic times are the perfect time to launch transformational technologies. Several of our clients are using this time to build rich applications that should revolutionize their marketplaces. But even if you can’t convince your management to make bold moves, there are many ways to keep innovating using the rich internet as a tool of differentiation. Uris and I are looking forward to discussing how AVIS, A&E, Motorola and others are doing just that in our talk on Tuesday (Nov. 18, 9:00 am – 10:00 am). For example, AVIS and Roundarch have created transactional banner ads (in Adobe Flex) that allow AVIS customers to complete a full reservation without even visiting AVIS.com. This innovation completely changes the traditional strategy of pushing everyone to your URL. They also have a full page version that they are deploying on affiliate sites. In both cases, AVIS is using rich technologies to completely challenge the status quo and doing it without breaking the bank.

The title of the talk is “Building Successful RIAs for the Enterprise in a Climate of Financial Uncertainty.” It is a mouthful. Perhaps a better title should have been “Thrive vs. Survive” which is core to our message. We strongly believe that those companies that use this economic downturn to push even more innovation will take significant share from those who just try to survive.

AdobeMAX