Adobe Leverages Ecosystem for RIA Dominance

Meanwhile, Adobe partner Cynergy Systems announced that it has launched Cynergy Media and Entertainment Division (Cynergy ME), a new division dedicated to creating rich and immersive online experiences for the media and entertainment market. Cynergy ME provides content creators and publishers - from major studios to independents - with leading-edge software design and development services to build incredibly engaging and cinematically rich applications for streaming media, interactive gaming and social engagement, using RIA technologies such as Adobe Flex and AIR.

"To meet the needs of the evolving online media and entertainment world, you need both well designed and developed software experiences and an enterprise-class platform that is scalable enough for millions of users," said Bryant Macy, director of product marketing at Adobe Systems, in a statement. "We're very excited to be a part of Cynergy's entrance into this space thanks to their proven experience in designing and building rich interactive applications, video and content. Using the Adobe Flash Platform, Cynergy can help their media and entertainment customers deliver more user value and reach the largest worldwide audience across the Web, desktops and devices."

In addition, at Adobe MAX, Acesis, an enterprise medical review software company, today launched its Clinical Review Product Suite, which leverages the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES), for a unique combination of enterprise-class infrastructure capabilities, cross-platform reach, and expressive, easy-to-use interfaces. The software will improve patient care by automating the medical peer review process while ensuring the security and confidentiality requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Meanwhile, tapping into the world of Microsoft developers, SapphireSteel Software will soon release a Flex development IDE (integrated development environment) called "Amethyst."

Huw Collingbourne, a spokesman for SapphireSteel, said, "Up to now we have concentrated on development tools for Ruby on Rails (our Visual Studio Ruby IDE, ‘Ruby In Steel’). Indeed, we were initially attracted to Flex as a means of providing enhanced Web-based ‘front ends’ to Rails applications. However, we soon realized that there was much more we could do to provide a general-purpose Flex environment for Visual Studio and so we decided to develop an environment which integrates Flex/AIR applications with other Visual Studio projects - potentially, everything from C# and ASP .NET to Ruby On Rails."

Yet by concentrating exclusively on Visual Studio programmers, "Amethyst addresses a different market segment from the Eclipse-based development offered by Flex Builder," Collingbourne said. "Put simply, it is our aim to make Flex/AIR development an easy and ‘natural’ alternative to WPF/Silverlight within Visual Studio."

There you have it. A company looking to make it easier for Adobe Flex and AIR developers to build applications that integrate with Microsoft technologies.