Waldo Smeets .com

Rich Internet Applications are entering the enterprise and get deployed behind the firewall. Philips – one of the worlds leading technology companies – has recently rolled out a Flex and AIR based application on top of SAP (the AIR app was developed by the guys at Apollogic).

The application is used by Key Account Managers and is a new user interface on top of SAP CRM, making those managers more productive when maintaining pricelists for their customers. The application is deployed online – integrated in the SAP pages, as well as off-line as an AIR application. The results are fantastic, because of this new interface account managers have become more productive and increased the frequency with which they maintain customer specific information, which is better for Philips and better for the customers.

Because of AIR they can now also easily access the data, which is normally stuck behind the firewall, in a safe and managed way whilst they are on the road. They can make price change proposals offline, and the AIR application routes everything back to SAP as soon as it gets connected.

This is a true SOA application that combines the best of Flex and AIR with the best of SAP. Rich DataGrids make the data more accessible, Batch Updates (leveraging SAP webservices) keep account managers more productive and Charts help them to better analyze the data. Last but not least they do Enterprise Mashups by pulling data from different backend systems into a single frontend.

Because if the Sence and Simplicity of the application I can not (yet) show you a recording of it, but we have published a case study (sorry, Dutch only right now) in which we interview the manager that came up with this idea. I’m sharing the document below, using Adobe’s new Document Sharing Service (the YouTube for documents?):