Flex Success Stories

Question

Hi there.
I have heard a lot of developers sing the praises of how
wonderful Flex is,
and as a developer myself, it's certainly an improvement over
using
Flash.exe to author Flash movies, for certain applications.
However what I am struggling to find is "real world"
production scenarios
where it's ("it" being "Flex" and the whole "RIA" concept)
actually proven
to be of much use.
Situations I'm investigating:
1) Companies that have had an existing HTML-based web
presence which
decided to jump to a Flex-driven RIA solution, and
experienced an up-turn
in business.
2) Companies which did NOT have an existing HTML-based web
presence, and
decided to go for a Flex / Flash UI as opposed to an HTML
one, the
rationale for doing so, and their resultant findings (harder
to quantify
the comparitive benefits in this case, I realise).
We're finding Flex to be be difficult to justify as a
technology. I don't
disagree that it's interesting and it *should* be a (cliche
alert) "killer
app", but I don't actually see it in the real world.
We have had a relationship with Macromedia (not sure how this
translates to
Adobe), and had asked them, but they never actually came up
with anything
(which is worrying). There seems to be a lot of claims of how
great all
this RIA is, but not a lot of tangible evidence that it's
great enough for
anyone with a cheque book to actually care.
So here I am asking the community. Does anyone have any
analysis or case
studies of Flex success stories?
I am NOT trying to knock Flex / Flash at all. On the
contrary, I am trying
to gather ammnunition as to how to justify using it to
potential clients.
*I* think it's a cool product.
Cheers.
Adam

Answer 1

My "increase sales from x to y" was an example, and perhaps
the most
easy to measure. How do you measure that your recruiters ARE
more
efficient?
They can spend more time scheduling more drives since they
have much
less paperwork to do for each mobile drive and that we are
meeting our
blood collection goals more frequently. This is the
improvement we saw
when we implemented an CF/HTML application three years ago.
I am in the process of rebuilding this application into a
CF/FLEX
solution, so we have obviously not seen any improvement here
yet, they
can't use it until I finish. But for the pieces I have shown
them they
are very excited. I would say there are going to be two
savings here.
I am implementing a much slicker, very desktop like UI much
easier and
quicker then if I had tried to do the same in a
HTML|DHTML|AJAX
techniques. So there is saving in my time. I am building new
features
that will allow the recruiters to create new drives, which is
something
that is still a very paper intensive process that does not
exist in the
current application. This will make it a bit harder to
measure since
there will not be an HTML version of this functionality to
compare
against. But since I can do at least some of this with Flex
wizards, my
development time is defiantly shorter.
But overall, FLEX is allowing me to delver features that have
long been
requested, but where difficult and time consuming to develop
with older
technologies.