Getting the ASP message

By LAUREN GIBBONS PAUL
Network World, 02/07/00

Paul Marshall knew one thing when he set out last June to add real-time messaging to his company's Web site: There was no way he could ask his internal IT department to develop and maintain the application.

As senior director of customer support for Yellow Freight System, a $1.9 billion shipping company in Overland Park, Kan., Marshall knew the IT people were already so consumed with other projects that it would take at least six months just to get a prototype. Marshall didn't want to wait. He needed a quicker way to add human interaction to the company's package-tracking Web site.

Marshall pic "The idea was not to take the place of the Web site, but to increase the site's stickiness so people would come back," Marshall says. He envisioned a real-time chat application where users could engage in a written dialog with a customer service person if they needed help while tracking their packages on the Web site. The goal was to off-load some of the burden on the call center. Marshall believed calls to the firm's 800 number would decrease as self-service traffic on the site increased.

Marshall was also worried that an online messaging application developed in-house would rapidly become obsolete. He wanted to avoid getting on the upgrade treadmill if at all possible. Scalability was another issue. He didn't want to have to pay today for capacity he might never need.

The solution presented itself after a routine Web search one day last June. Why not outsource the development and hosting of the messaging application to FaceTime Communications, an application service provider (ASP) in Foster City, Calif., that hosts its own software application, FaceTime Message Exchange? Although the ASP model was not getting much press at the time, Marshall intuitively saw how this form of selective outsourcing could solve a lot of his problems. He fired off an e-mail to the company.

FaceTime's proposal amazed him. "They said they would have the application up and running in seven days," Marshall says. He was also impressed with the pricing structure, which was based on usage. The charges start at $250 per customer service agent, per month; implementation costs average about $5,000.

But Marshall worried about security. Hosting the application would require behind-the-firewall access. And because the Internet would be the transport mechanism between FaceTime's data center provider and Yellow Freight headquarters, he wasn't sure if this would meet Yellow Freight's strict data security requirements.

"We were giving them the keys to the front door. We had to stop and think about this,"Marshall says. So, he put the corporate security expert on the case. That person spoke to FaceTime officials and became satisfied that the application would be secure, for a number of reasons, according to David Hsieh, vice president of business affairs and co-founder of FaceTime.

First, the FaceTime application features Secure Sockets Layer encryption. Second, the application uses a proprietary protocol that rides on top of TCP/IP, making it very difficult for someone to spoof or crack. Third, the application - live chat between a customer service representative and a customer - isn't very sensitive. Yellow Freight's security expert agreed to open the company's firewall to FaceTime's pre-identified set of IP addresses.

Financial security was another risk of going with FaceTime. The company was a start-up and had no customers when Yellow Freight initiated talks. However, Marshall was impressed with the credibility of the company's founders. "They had some pretty good venture capital, and they had an application. They were ready to do business with us," he says.

So far, Marshall has been very pleased with his decision. Site traffic has increased from about 20 users per day to several hundred, and the costs are reasonable, he says.

Performance has been excellent, and the FaceTime staff is very responsive when problems crop up. FaceTime truly owns the application and the user experience, Marshall says. "They don't just sell you something and walk away. They have a lot of skin in the game," he says. "The application is up to date. It's not my problem - it's theirs."

It's still too early to gauge how much the application has lightened the load on the call center, but Marshall is convinced it has. And he's proud that Yellow Freight was the first freight carrier in its market to offer live contact on a Web site. "The hosted solution was the best - the only alternative for us. Otherwise, we would not have been able to do it," Marshall says.