ASP attack, 09/27/99

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Error 404--Not Found

From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

By DENISE PAPPALARDO Network World, 09/27/99

Like the Big Bad Wolf in the classic children's fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, a host of services providers are salivating over the opportunity presented by the young application outsourcing market. But the last thing any network executive wants is to become the foolish victim.

Believing every promise made by an application service provider (ASP) could land you in a heap of trouble down the road, so don't go into this process ignorantly. Knowing what to ask for from an ASP and how to determine if application hosting will benefit your company will keep you on the safe path.

Let's start with a definition: An ASP is a company that offers rentable applications to multiple business users from a shared data center over the Internet, an ATM, frame relay or even a private-line network. The applications are typically accessed from a user's PC in one of three ways: via a standard Web browser, a thin client or an application-specific client.

Many ASPs offer managed application and database servers, security, system backup, disaster recovery and service-level agreements (SLA). And with more than 150 companies fitting the ASP definition today, it's easy to find an array of applications for rent, from Microsoft Exchange e-mail to PeopleSoft financials.

But be aware of the fact that there is no one ASP model. Corio, a Redwood City, Calif., ASP specializing in PeopleSoft enterprise relationship management (ERM) software, offers a 99.9% application availability guarantee. But that doesn't mean you'll get the same promise from newly formed Qwest Cyber.Solutions when it rolls out its SAP and Siebel application hosting services. You'll find it difficult to compare pricing, contracts and SLAs from any of the ASPs - a circumstance that proves the market is extremely immature, says Julia Giera, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Norwell, Mass.

The market will get there in due time - and perhaps with the help of groups such as the ASP Consortium, a four-month-old industry forum created to define the market, its best practices and technologies. For today, users who want hosted services have a lot of figuring out to do on their own.

Four to live by

The biggest question any business user must answer is: What advantages will an ASP provide that I can't get in-house?

Giga offers four reasons why you would outsource an application rather than deploy servers, obtain software licenses and gear up your staff to support a new companywide deployment. They are: to improve service; obtain a strategic advantage; reduce risks by being able to move quickly with low capital investments; and reduce costs.

In part, improving service means getting more bandwidth than you could afford otherwise. For example, many ASPs are setting up data centers that have dedicated Internet bandwidth - oftentimes to multiple ISPs. With connections to six ISPs, Annapolis, Md.-based ASP USinternetworking serves as a good example. USi specializes in combining enterprise and customer relationship management (CRM) applications with electronic-commerce hosting and data warehousing. USi has built its own data centers - two in the U.S. and two overseas - for ultimate control.

Connections between USi's Annapolis and Milpitas, Calif., data centers and the six chosen ISPs - AGIS, Cable & Wireless, Digex, GTE Internetworking, Sprint and UUNET - operate at speeds ranging from T-3 to OC-3. Most user organizations would simply find the availability of this much bandwidth hard to match.

But users are not limited to buying dedicated Internet access service from any of these six providers. In fact, users don't even have to buy Internet service; USi also offers frame relay and private-line access to its data centers. The scope allows most business users to access either of USi's data centers quickly and reliably from anywhere.

Besides getting more bandwidth, you also want to think about staffing requirements when it comes time to evaluate whether taking the ASP route will help improve service to employees. That staffing aspect factored into Sunburst Hospitality's decision to outsource its PeopleSoft financial applications to USi.

Sunburst was left with an applications void after being spun off from Choice Hotels International less than a year ago. Choice Hotels, a former sister company, had been providing Sunburst with all of its financial applications through a managed data center manned by about 15 to 20 people, says Mark Elbaum, director of IS at Sunburst, a national hotel chain based in Silver Spring, Md.

Because Sunburst was essentially outsourcing its PeopleSoft application needs already, it wasn't a huge leap for the company to choose an ASP service. But Elbaum says USi is offering Sunburst "a lot more than we could provide internally, from a 24-7 help desk to redundancy."

About 25 Sunburst employees, each outfitted with a PeopleSoft client, access financial applications today over a private line in to USi's Annapolis data center 40 miles away. Most of the employees frequently use the general ledger, accounts payable and asset management tools that are part of the PeopleSoft financials program.

But Elbaum says he plans on providing application access to 4,000 employees, at all 87 Sunburst hotels, over the Internet by year-end. These additional employees will simply be viewing screens as opposed to running reports and processes, as the two dozen or so heavy users have been doing since January.

Staffing concern was a big factor in Elbaum's decision. "It's very hard to find talent. Anyone who knows PeopleSoft demands a high premium - some of the people with a year or two experience were commanding salaries that were completely ridiculous," he says.