UX - User Experience - Biz. relevance for SI

1) ECommerce applications:
Whether it is Insurance or BOA or Amex or Ingram or Motorola or Amazon, all companies are being pressured to give review and ratings (amazon, amex, BOA), comparison (progressive insurance), streaming video reviews (amazon) to the end users and analysts.
- This on-line channel of providing enhanced features is not only in demand for web apps but also for iPhone apps or black berry apps; which is big business. BOA recently came up with a free black berry app made in flex or silverlight.
- Streaming video product reviews are now being sold by companies like CNET which requires a company not only to strategise on their search and web content management but also the way to present it. Flash player or Java fx or silver light are major contenders for this business depending on the current infrastructure of the company. This area is still maturing and there are a lot of opportunities in this area.
- Most insurance and banking companies are yet to convert their peripheral apps like stock trading in BOA or profile management in Chase to RIAs.
- Desktop widgets are other applications which are catching good traction in the market. Southwest, Amazon, Google are the early winners in this. Even in this area big vendors have taken sides. For eg SAP Widget toolkit is an add on to Yahoo Widget Toolkit and Yahoo engine (actually a prerequisite.)

2) BI Applications
Companies like Microstrategy (version 9) or BO (Excelcious) have come out with capabilities where in either
- The UI generated by the engine by drag and drop ides is RIAs or
- The development environment demands skills in flex or silverlight or
- The UI to be developed and tweaked is for desktop widgets (for KPI level notifications or alerts.)
Though the first one is not much of a opty from a services perspective the last two can definitely be of value add in the BI domain. As UX is never a focus when strategising BI companies often scamper around for this skillset as it is not in their planning.

3) ISV Capability
Actuate, Pentaho, Microstrategy, BO, SAP or Oracle (any small, medium or big vendor) are companies which are looking for changing the rendering technology of their UI generating engines to be in RIA oriented. For eg SAP is not changing the way we develop webdynpros. But they are changing the engine that generates htmls to give an option to the companies to select between plain html and AJAX. This trend is now being followed by smaller companies like microstrategy or actuate. This is creating new opportunities in product enhancement space. The same eg can also be carried over in other UX based tools like portals or ECommerce engines.

4) Internal apps/Portal apps.
Internal applications and portal apps which face the employees of organizations are being RIAfied in the enterprise pretty regularly now. A quick task approval app in the form of a desktop widget or a mobile app or travel reimbursement app in disconnected and connected mode is very common in the enterprises. Most of these apps are custom and is a huge space for development support services. 

5) Consulting services
- Big companies like Ingram Micro or Motorola or BOA or Amex have different regions in the globe having their own apps. Ingram uses Cold fusion in Asia PAC, YUI in UK, JSP in US and PHP in Germany. Consolidating them to one UX to take competitive advantage of the customer facing channel and showing a single face to the customer is one service a lot of companies need.
- Another service is definitely UX toolset selection and TCO recognition.

Some points to ponder or what I saw customers talking about..
1) Big application vendors have started to take sides with these technologies like SAP is taking flex or Oracle is taking up JSF (they call the enhanced version ADFs), Microsoft with silverlight and lighter weight AJAX in ASP.NET and C#. So for most companies the choice becomes a taken and they just move ahead with what the most affluent vendor in the company suggests as the roadmap.
2) According to some analysts big companies (Dell, AMEX, Visa, HP, Intel etc.) with large on line presence are not using any of these technologies to bare bones. They have matured to a stage where in they have their own frameworks (controls, UI screens, data transformation logic etc) built as a company wide standard. These frameworks are not going anywhere.
3) UX applications are also gaining visibility because of their default scaling capabilities in other channels. E.g. SAP Webdynpro or Flex player requires zero or minimum coding for converting a web app to desk top app or a mobile app.