Survey shows popularity of ASPs increasing

Application service providers are gaining in both customers and customer satisfaction, according to a tracking survey released Tuesday by the ASP Industry Consortium.

The consortium is an international group dedicated to promoting the ASP industry. The study, second in a quarterly series, was conducted by Zona Research.

The main factors driving enterprises to move to the ASP model, according to the survey, are cost savings, the ability to focus on business objectives and the speed of application implementation.

The survey sampled 131 managers and IT professionals and found that 63.4% of the respondents meeting the survey criteria said their firms used ASPs, up from 52.4% in the first quarter survey.

Ninety percent of the respondents said they were happy with their service-level agreements (SLA), up from 81% in the earlier survey. The most common recommended changes listed by those dissatisfied with their SLAs were greater guaranteed availability and better responsiveness to SLA violations.

Respondents listed the possibility that data security could be compromised as the most crucial problem that could arise from using an ASP.

Just over 53% of respondents said the average ASP response time to support calls was under an hour, up from 43.6% in the first survey.

ASP Industry Consortium: www.aspindustry.org