Network World columnists and newsletter
authors share soulful opinions on some of the network topics
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Network World,
09/11/00
ASPs
Which companies playing in the application service provider (ASP) market today have what it takes to handle the enterprise business?
Gibbs: There are a lot of them out that are sitting on the end of a very thin pipe. They have no redundancy in their system, and should they suffer disk failure, you could pretty much kiss your data goodbye. On the other extreme, you've got SAP as an example. It has a huge infrastructure and understands that if it doesn't do it right, it irreparably damages share price.
McClimans: I think you can rule out, for the most part, all of the small [competitive local exchange carriers] and ISPs that have set up hosting centers and are now claiming to be ASPs. Personally, I probably would not trust them with a Fortune 1,000 application. They're too small and on the wrong end of the extreme.
Gibbs: Critical Path Software. There's an example of an ASP in a fairly narrow definition of service - it just does e-mail, but it does it right. It's got 600 customers, several million users. It has some very well-defined [service-level agreements]. These people know what they're doing. Whereas if you go down to, well I'd say 95% of the [customer relationship management] offerings out there, they really aren't at an infrastructure level adequate for anything more than casual use.
Taylor: I always get amazed at our ability to take old ideas and rename them and pretend we've come up with something new. To me, ASPs are merely 21st century time sharing.
Gibbs: Man, you're a cynic.
Taylor: Actually, there were good reasons that we did time sharing, and the reason we did time sharing 20 years ago was because computers were too expensive. Today, computers are cheap, but people to run those computers and to manage those services are too expensive. I think ASPs are going to provide a very viable type of service, particularly for the companies that are having a hard time finding enough people to keep applications up and running.
Define what ASP means to you.
McClimans. I subscribe to the theory, going back to George Orwell, that all service providers are equal. It's just that some are more equal than others. Some provide more services than others do in different areas. There's the extreme end, where a company is truly hosting applications and managing those applications for you and you've got a distributed workforce that accesses those through the Web. On the marginal line, you've got those organizations that are doing more than your basic hosting of your basic Web site that are actually involved in the management of those devices.
Everybody seems to be moving deeper and deeper into that model where they really are fully hosting applications, and I think that's valid. But, ASP is becoming a marketing term more than anything.
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