The Economics of RIAs

The current state of the economy has every business thinking about cost cutting and higher productivity. This is fueling significant growth in the Rich Internet Application space. There are numerous examples of businesses achieving substantial return on investment from RIAs. For instance, Allurent, a company that builds RIA E-Commerce solutions, created a better web shopping experience for Borders.com that resulted in 62% higher order conversion. Here is a great video that goes into more details about what they did:

Another great example of huge ROI with RIAs comes from my friend John Barnes at Model Metrics. John states “Flex enabled us to build an RIA that was simply not possible with AJAX alone. Our PerfectCall framework leverages the full power of RIAs and has allowed our clients to increase the number of outbound calls they can make from 10 per hour to 50 an hour, which translates to incredible ROI.”

The ROI of RIA is also a topic that Jon Rose and I dive into with Anthony Franco, President of EffectiveUI, in the most recent episode of Drunk on Software:

All of the great technical paradigm shifts in history were accompanied by global economic changes. Right now we are in the midst of dramatic global economic change. This will significantly accelerate the adoption of RIAs as a way to reduce costs, boost productivity, and increase ROI. EffectiveUI, Model Metrics, and other industry leaders are already seeing these results and many others will soon.