Corio service to tackle legacy applications management
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SAN CARLOS, CALIF. - Corio has come up with a fresh twist on its application service offerings. Rather than just deliver new applications to customers, the company is also going to support customers' existing applications.
Corio's Intelligent Infrastructure service will offer customers a personalized package of managed services - such as hosting, storage administration and account management - for a monthly fee.
"We view ourselves as an IT factory. This is really a configure-to-order type of thing, so customers can tailor it to meet their particular needs," says Richard Hillebrecht, Corio's vice president of operations.
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One example is a company that has licensed and implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from PeopleSoft, but wants to refocus its technical resources on other projects. Corio can move the company's PeopleSoft application onto servers managed by Corio and take over the maintenance of that application.
Lack of tech support
Another company may have SAP's ERP applications running on a data center and network it's satisfied with, but lack the technical resources needed to administer the software. In that case, the company could contract for Corio's application technical support, and Corio's SAP experts would tap into the customer's data center remotely to handle administration, Hillebrecht says.
Other application service providers, such as USinternetworking, also offer assorted hosting and other nontraditional ASP services, although most target independent software vendors (ISV) looking to deliver their products via the Internet. Corio will address ISVs too, but its new offering focuses on corporations looking to better manage their applications.
Corio's new offering puts the company more into competition with Loudcloud, which manages software, hardware and network services for customers. Corio hopes to have an edge based on its expertise in delivering application services since 1998.
Who pays for all of this?
Amy Mizoras, an analyst with market research firm IDC, says it's good that Corio is leveraging its expertise, although she wonders where Corio will come up with the resources to integrate and manage a slew of different legacy and proprietary applications. "I'm skeptical they might bite off more than they can chew," she says.
Hillebrecht says Corio isn't seeking to be the expert in all applications. The idea, he says, is to offer companies Corio's technical expertise and hardware resources and then create a partnership with the customer's IT staff, which may retain some responsibility, or the software vendor. "It's not Corio providing 100% of the solution; it's Corio putting together the solution with the ISV and the customer," he says.
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