Who is using Flex?

When talking about a new tool, policymakers in the software industry often use the acceptance rate as a key indicator of whether to welcome it. Adobe's Flex framework seems to be facing a critical point, and many large companies are now using Flex to implement new products. So who are using Flex?

Flex is a key part of SAP's plan to improve the quality of product user interfaces. In a recent itworld.com interview, James Governor explained sap's needs in improving the quality of user interfaces:

"Everything that can improve the sap interface is good, and the current sap interface is difficult to use," said James governor, an industry analyst at redmonk LLC.

Spend analytics is sap's first full investment in flex:

"Sap was just developing its first software that fully uses flex, called spend analytics, to collect and analyze expenditure data," Matthias Zeller said in a tech ed speech, he is Adobe's Senior Product Manager.

HP is also catching up with the flex trend. They recently released the print studio built with Flex. Adobe's Mike Potter also introduced this application on his blog. He roughly described the operation of this application and commented:

This is a very good-looking flex application, not at all as we usually see flex. HP is doing well!

Google also entered the flex development community with its flex version of searchmash. Mike Potter also made some comments on this application:

This flex application is particularly interesting. First, you can play a video directly in the search results when searching for a video without having to jump to the website. This is a good small improvement, even though they can achieve it in HTML (the video can be played on the right side of the search results window-it would be even better if the search results themselves can be played ).

The second interesting thing is that they embedded Google maps into the flex program. I don't have time to figure out how they do it (whether HTML is superimposed on the flex program or they write a Google Map for flex), but either solution is cool.

In addition to those companies that have accepted flex, Adobe has also organized some stakeholder partnerships, including recent alliances with business objects. Pcworld.com details this partnership:

Adobe Systems Inc. is working with business objects SA to add business intelligence to Ria.

...... Adobe and Business Objects will also explore technologies that integrate the flex development environment with xcelsius, hoping that developers can create more visually attractive business intelligence applications faster and more conveniently.

In addition to an increasing number of organizations building flex applications, Adobe is proud of its early adopters of air. The register lists many notable companies at the Adobe Max 2007 Conference:

Adobe took a list of early recipients at the max 07 conference in Chicago to show off the information that air is ready. AOL, eBay, PayPal, Business Objects, SAP, Yahoo! And salesforce.com have come up with desktop applications developed with air, flex, and Flash to sell.

Adobe was very busy during this time. Behind these exaggerated advertisements, there must be many interested recipients who are doing some real things.