Laszlo raking in customers, developers, and application visibility

Laszlo Systems announced today that they've been seeing a lot of traction with OpenLaszlo. I don't have numbers that I can compare these announcements to, but I think it's clear that OpenLaszlo is doing quite well in a crowded RIA market. In the first half of this year, OpenLaszlo applications have been served to an average of 40 million people per month. That includes applications deployed to high profile clients like WalMart.com, Monster.com and H&R Block. Other companies have come on board and started using OpenLaszlo technology in the first half of this year. T Rowe Price, Barclays Global, Renaissance Learning, United States Air Force, Coghead, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology all rolled out an OpenLaszlo solution this year.

In addition to the increase in customers and visibility, the developer numbers for OpenLaszlo seem to be increasing. According to statistics based on a number of metrics that OpenLaszlo tracks, they estimate the developer community currently sits at 75,000 which is a great foundation for the company. OpenLaszlo continues to be a technology that I think people should watch. With their OpenLaszlo 4 release earlier this year, they added Ajax support so that rich internet application developers can build something in OpenLaszlo and deploy it as either Ajax or Flash. With the increase in RIA platforms, OpenLaszlo could provide developers a way to hit a number of them. If OpenLaszlo could add reliable support for Silverlight and JavaFX, I think a lot of people would stand up and take notice. That would be a huge engineering feat, but it's worth keeping an eye on.