So if an Enterprise was looking at investigate adopting Rich Internet Applications they would want to understand the following questions:

1) What are the business drivers?

Cost and Complexity in IT datacenters is driving to a model of utility computing in the datacenters (and/or) utility computing in the cloud.
Business Agility ... the BUITs need to be able to react to market conditions at internet pace... Most Global 1000 corporate data centers are not capable this rate of change.
Huge changes in development of software ... The Web is the hub that meshes everything together.

2) What are the major trends?

Connected Development... The next big development push is the SOA in the cloud and in datacenters that developers will be able to create these hybrid/mesh/mashup solutions. The API is no longer on the developers harddrive ...the APIs now reside it on the intranet and internet.

Utility computing in the datacenter and the cloud distributed and federated together.

Social Networks and UGC User Generated Content and Search

Advestising business model for software development (40 billion to 80 over the next 3 years)

The Client Rising!!! New internet capable devices (moblie phones, cars,  Ipods/Zune, more and more devices coming online)

Lego / widget programming... Small pieces loosely joined... http://www.popfly.com/

3) Who are the major players? strength position and plan?

Key Players are Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Yahoo

4) what are the major technologies, standards and their maturity level?

TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, AJAX, REST, WS*, WS-BasicProfile, MEDIA, Silverlight, Flex, AIR, Google webapi, Amazon webapi, Live webapi, yahoo webapi,  RSS, Java, CSS DOM,

5) What is the adoption level? (all industries; banking industries, major areas, for what purposes?)

Adoption curve is really at the beginning of the wave.

 This is a big transformation which will take a while to play out.

I will look into further investigation of these topics in future posts.

Cheers