Tedde van Gelderen, managing partner for Toronto-based design consulting company Akendi, confirms that there are many businesses that should be deploying RIA and haven’t yet taken the plunge.

“It’s still very early days for this, and we’re nowhere near [any serious level] of adoption,” he says. “I’d say it will be five to eight years before it hits mainstream.”

He believes that the biggest driver behind the shift to RIA is the growing expectation on the part of users in terms of what they can do at a website.

“It [the web] is not just about information,” he says of the public’s increasing demands. “People expect them [sites] to have the same functionality and level of interaction as desktop applications. They want to be able to click on a button and have information pop up in the same window. Or move things around on screen, enter values, submit content and receive instant updates.”

Another aspect of RIA is that it pulls information from a lot more sources than you might expect, says Van Gelderen. For example, an RIA map could display stores and restaurants within a specific area, but also provide detailed navigation information from the user’s current location to a specific business that takes into account the current traffic conditions and calculates the best route. It could also pull in customer relationship management data on the user’s purchasing habits or dining preferences and combine it with information from specific local businesses so that personal messages, purchasing recommendations or specials would be highlighted on the same map. This is slick from the user’s point of view and it can boost sales for a business, but it typically requires much more development time than an old-style web page that simply shows the location and phone number of stores and restaurants.

From: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/internet/ria.html

Tedde van Gelderen