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Through the use of new development environments, combined with Web services and an emerging set of collaboration technologies, Web applications are matching and threatening to exceed the capabilities of their shrink-wrapped antecedents. It's safe to say that the days of classical offline desktop applications and simple informational Web sites are rapidly drawing to a close. It's also safe to say that while the next generation of Web applications will combine both the richness of the desktop and the networking of the Internet, there are still a number of concerns that need to be addressed around security, transition costs, and other factors.

For this report, InformationWeek Analytics polled both technical decision makers (TDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs) for their interest in, and concerns about, next-generation Web applications in three areas: advancements in user interface; the integration of business intelligence and event processing with collaboration tools; and their interest in hosting some application functions in the cloud. One result of the survey that shouldn't surprise anyone is the popularity of "eye candy" rich Internet applications (RIAs) with both TDMs and BDMs.The consensus of our survey of 415 business technology professionals indicates that RIAs are widely accepted and are now the technology of choice for many new Web development projects.

Although not as far along as most corporate RIA initiatives, there is similar interest in the use of combined business intelligence, event processing, and collaboration tools to kick off complex tasks, such as bringing appropriate teams together to make critical decisions and alerting stake holders of key developments.While there is some interest among smaller companies and startups for hosting applications in the cloud—as a way to add robust IT infrastructure at minimal cost, for example—enterprise decision makers by and large are much more skeptical about cloud computing, citing issues such as security, governance, privacy, and control.That skepticism is reflected in the 50% negative response from both TDMs and BDMs who said they do not expect to host any application functions in the cloud over the next 24 months.

This point was made more vociferously by Scott Wentzka, a senior architect with Paisley Consulting, a Minnesota provider of governance, risk, and compliance software. "Cloud computing is an over-priced fraud," says Wentzka. "If you actually figure out the real TCO, it's about four times as expensive as internally hosted applications. On the other hand, RIA technology is the real deal—faster, more interactive, and less painful to develop than the ancient kludge that is HTML and JavaScript."

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