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What
is an ASP? Enterprise
acceptance of server-based computing, along with mass adoption of
the Internet, increases in server capacity and broad availability
of cost-effective bandwidth are fueling the emergence of the
application service provider market. Industry analyst According
to the ASP Industry Consortium, an independent international
advocacy group dedicated to fostering greater understanding of and
guidelines for the fast-emerging ASP segment of the computer
industry, an ASP is defined as: “An
Application Service Provider (ASP) manages and delivers application
capabilities to multiple entities from a data center across a wide
area network.” The
Application Service Provider community represents a new global
industry devoted to There
are many types of application service providers. Some focus on
augmenting in-house enterprise IT professionals with best practices,
such as document management; while others provide enterprise-class
software services to small- and medium-sized organizations; still
other ASPs offer specialist software packages to vertical markets,
such as education or healthcare. Typically, the application service
provider charges the end-user organization a fixed, monthly fee
based on application usage and services rendered, such as additional
requirements in hardware, service and support, maintenance and
upgrades. How to Keep IT Moving at the
Speed of Business Information
technology (IT) has become the strategic weapon of market leaders
everywhere for supporting, influencing and transforming the way
companies do business. In today’s Internet-driven economy,
business success is tied directly to the speed with which new
business initiatives can be launched against an existing IT
infrastructure. Today’s
business imperative can be stated: Time to launch a business-driven IT initiative = time to
build the platform + time to build the application + the time to
deploy the appl. While
the above equation seems simplistic in nature, in reality, resource,
technology and manpower gaps often exist to prevent execution
against it. Organizations face tremendous challenges in aligning IT
infrastructures in support of new business initiatives: including
perpetual technology churn, increasing computing diversity,
never-ending capital and resource constraints and continual risks
surrounding IT projects. The complexity and cost of delivering
business-critical applications to today’s worker at the right
times and in the right places have simply become overwhelming. As a
result, organizations often pay the opportunity cost of delaying or
not taking advantage of new business opportunities because of IT
infrastructure limitations. The
key to successful use of information technology as a competitive
weapon is a flexible, adaptable infrastructure that empowers an
organization to move at the speed of business, before the
competition. A new
breed of information technology service provider has arisen to
address the dissonance that exists between business imperatives and
IT realities in today’s global business landscape. Application
Service Providers (ASPs) host software from centralized data
centers, renting access over dedicated, high-speed networks or the
Internet. Representing a new competitive weapon in information
technology, application service providers maximize time-to-market on
new business innovations through scalable IT resources and
infrastructure. Driven
by market necessity, ASPs make world-class applications and IT best
practices accessible and affordable for organizations of all sizes.
Application service providers offer organizations “Digital
Independence” – the ability to leverage virtually everything in
their computing environments to reach more users, with more
applications, in more locations at record speeds. As a result,
application service providers can minimize the risks, costs and
complexities of implementing new business initiatives, while
increasing an organization’s flexibility to quickly capitalize on
changing business conditions.
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