Outsourcing your apps management

In contrast to the traditional ISP, this service segment has only been in existence less than a year. In addition, the set of providers that claim to offer this class of service is an interesting one indeed. The players range from traditional RBOCs (including both US West and Bell South) to more mainstream ISPs (including Digex and Concentric) as well as mainstream product vendors (Oracle and IBM) and more specialized focused players (such as Portera and Navisite). Both the newness of the segment and the diverse background of the players result in a lot of consequential service diversity. This includes diversity in service offerings, supported applications and platforms, service quality guarantees, and high application availability features such as server isolation load balancing and mirroring.

However, if you happen to be an IT manager interested in what a MAP could do for your business, there are specific service aspects that many of the key players appear to have in common. Some of these aspects are what you might expect from this class of player and some are not quite so intuitive. On the fairly intuitive side, at least 10 providers offer some form of managed services for hosted e-mail, e-commerce, collaborative groupware and managed Web site services. Managed services for what would be considered more traditional enterprise applications -- such as ERP, accounts payable, human resources management and data warehousing -- are also available from roughly six or seven players. This may prove to be a tougher sell since the Internet has not traditionally been the design center of choice for this class of applications.

On the nonintuitive side, the MAP community thus far has been more aggressive than the traditional ISP community in both adopting service level agreements and providing more effective tools to monitor their delivery. At least 13 providers support Web access to service delivery reports as well as provide users with a more real time means of tracking service delivery quality. In addition, the isolation, load balancing and mirroring features that many of these same providers are offering users has more of a feel similar to a glass house operations outsourcer than a lean and mean ISP.

Given the rapidly accelerating pace of Internet application deployment, particularly in the e-commerce arena, MAP-class services are an idea that's time is rapidly coming. While more service provider critical mass is needed, good solid success stories need to be documented and a broader-based value proposition needs to be formulated, the use of a MAP will likely make good business sense for a number of users. And for the great majority of the already overloaded system and network managers out there, who couldn't use a little extra help?