With the growing popularity of consumer Web sites such as Google Maps, YouTube, and Flickr, the consumer sector is aggressively endorsing Web 2.0 technologies. Increasingly, enterprises are recognizing the business value of the Web platform over the high cost of ownership and limited reach of existing client/server applications. The fastest way for enterprises to start reaping the benefits of Web 2.0 is via rich Internet applications (RIA) rather than wikis, blogs, tags, mashups, or social networks. RIAs offer the most immediate return on investment (ROI) for enterprises because the technology improves the user experience and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Enterprise 2.0 goes beyond the scope of just deploying Web 2.0 components. Unlike consumer-centric applications, enterprise applications must combine complex transactional capabilities with high scalability and extreme performance. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users doing mostly simple tasks, enterprise Web applications cater more to "power users" who need to interactively analyze and visualize large volumes of information stored in business-critical databases and interoperate with existing legacy applications. Whether created by porting existing applications to the Web or by starting fresh, this new generation of Enterprise 2.0 applications must deliver performance, processing power and graphical sophistication equivalent to or better than what users experience with traditional client/server enterprise applications.

The widespread adoption of AJAX in the consumer space has made it an easy answer for business-to-consumer (B2C) application development. While adequate for the first wave of Web applications geared toward consumers, AJAX does not have the capabilities to meet all the requirements for the next generation of Web applications and more advanced software-as-a-service models. New RIA technologies have emerged to offer capabilities that go beyond the traditional functionality that AJAX provides. As the RIA category continues to gain mindshare, lingering misconceptions about the range of available RIA technologies need to be addressed so companies and enterprise application developers can correctly answer their key question: "What exactly should we look for in an enterprise RIA platform?"

Market Evolution
Figure 1 summarizes the evolution of enterprise software architecture toward RIA. Fortune 1000 companies, along with many others, spent a lot of resources during the 1980s and 1990s building client/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 Web 2.0 technologies make possible, enterprises now need to progress beyond this client/server model to the next evolutionary stage.