The company also unveiled its next-generation Flash player, codenamed "Maelstrom," which is currently being beta tested and will most likely be released later this summer.

The Flash Platform includes a collection of individual Macromedia Inc. products, many of which have been in the public eye for a long time. Now, they've been brought together to form an interactive coalition.

Platform users will have access to the Flash Player; development tool Macromedia Flex; Flash MX 2004 for content creation; the Flash Communication Server for two-way audio and video streaming; FlashCast, which delivers mobile content; and Flash Lite, which is used to run Flash on mobile devices.

Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop said the Platform will help companies in all of these fields create a better customer experience on the Web.

"Great experiences improve customer and employee interaction, directly improve sales and deliver a compelling brand experience," Elop said, "leading to significant return on investment through increased use, brand loyalty and customer satisfaction."

Third-party tools and solutions based on the Flash Platform will be a big part of the system as well, such as the SAP NetWeaver Visual Computer announced last month.

Click here to read more about third-party support for Flash.

"Flash has grown up into today's Flash Platform, delivering a next-generation user experience to customers who develop interactive content, applications and communications for use across multiple browsers, operating systems and devices," Macromedia Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch said.

"The Flash Platform provides the solid foundation for delivering experiences that perfectly complement existing enterprise infrastructures and server-side technologies like J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] and .Net," Lynch said.

Companies have already been putting the Flash Platform to work to create rich media sites. For instance, Purdue University uses Macromedia Breeze to hold virtual office hours and online conferences. Discount clothing store TJ Maxx used it to create a simplified and intuitive shopping cart for its Web site.

The Sherwin-Williams Co. used the Platform to construct its Color Visualizer, an interactive tool that allows customers to try out different paint color combinations on virtual interior and exterior environments.

Whitmann-Hart Information Architect Andy Dennee, who worked with Sherwin-Williams to create the color tool, said the new Platform has enabled his team to create a site with rich color, photorealistic images and real-time lighting, something he said wasn't possible before, using just the HTML paradigm.

Dennee said he sees big things ahead for the platform.

"It's really like the printing press," he said. "It represents such a significant shift of the experience you can provide to the user—keeping them interested and engaged in the online experience."

After the painting tool launched on the Sherwin-Williams site, Dennee said that users have gone from spending under one minute on the Web site to around seven minutes per session.

Analysts have provided equally glowing reports on the new platform. Joe Laslow, research director at JupiterResearch of Jupitermedia Corp., said he was "impressed" and that the product was "fantastic."

"It's always kind of impressive to me how much Macromedia manages to innovate from one iteration to the next," Laslow said. "It will definitely help strengthen the overall Macromedia platform—including the back-end tools that matter to developers."

Read more here about advances in Flash applications, as demonstrated at the FlashForward conference.

If Macromedia's new platform catches on in the development community, there's a potential risk that it will compete with Microsoft Corp.'s much-discussed, but still unseen, rich-media development tool set. Analysts say there's probably no chance for overlap once the Microsoft platform reaches the market.

"I don't think Microsoft would do anything to make Flash difficult to be distributed and developed," Yankee Group Research Inc. Research Director Tom Dwyer said. "It will probably coexist in the Microsoft world pretty well."

Macromedia also announced plans to join the Eclipse Foundation and will deliver a rich Internet application, code-named Zorn, a development tool based on the organization's universal development platform.

Dwyer said this is a significant move for Macromedia because Eclipse is one of the strongest standardized development programs that's being "wildly adopted" across multiple platforms.

"It means that all of the people who are very comfortable with the Eclipse environment will now be more apt to build presentations using Flash," he said. "It will really improve the reach of the Flash Platform."

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