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Application Service Providers – What are they?

Removing the Complexity and Cost in Today’s Computing Environments

What if telephone systems were as complicated as today’s computing environments? Think of how frustrating it would be if requesting a simple new service, such as call waiting, required the phone company to send a technician to your home to install new software on all your phones. Some of your phones might require more memory and others might have to be replaced with a newer model. Imagine the technician spending hours to reconfigure each phone for optimum performance, only to conclude that you really need a complete wiring upgrade for the system to work properly.

It sounds ridiculous. Yet thousands of organizations suffer through this procedure every day when trying to install and manage the applications their users require to be productive and competitive. And countless others are effectively denied access to the business advantages of enterprise applications because they cannot afford the software, the computing infrastructure, or IT talent to run them.

These are the very reasons application service providers (ASPs) have emerged: to give organizations of any size fast, predictable, affordable access to virtually any application. As a result, organizations are free to focus on the speed and competitiveness of their operations, unencumbered by hardware, software, database, network and peopleware constraints. Under the ASP computing model, even the smallest, most resource-constrained companies can access best-of-breed technology solutions to level the competitive playing field in today's global, networked economy. Fundamentally, the ASP movement is about business transformation.


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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 group Forrester Research projects the application hosting market will reach $6.4 billion by 2001, creating new opportunities for suppliers and end-user organizations alike.

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 reliable, predictable and efficient delivery of advanced application services to a broad range of businesses and individual consumers. Application services range from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relation-ship management solutions and vertical applications, to groupware,  personal productivity suites and full desktop and printing services. Through application hosting, application service providers remove the burden of day-to-day IT management by assuming total responsibility for application rollout, updates and on-going maintenance and support. As a result, organizations are free to focus on core business objectives, rather than arduous IT issues.

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.

Extending the reach of applications to new markets in new ways Application service providers represent a model for extending the reach of applications to new markets in new ways by removing the cost and complexity barriers that prevents more than 95 percent of the world’s population from computing today. The future holds the promise for application services that are as ubiquitous, easy-to-use and affordable as the telephone. New applications can be "turned on” as conveniently as call forwarding, call waiting and caller ID services. And in a connected world of application services, the potential to extend applications to every consumer and business is limitless.


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.

The ASP market represents a convergence of IT and telecommunications in a way not seen before. While the availability of static data across the Internet found its being through the World Wide Web, the deployment of powerful applications and interactive services across wide area telecom networks is a milestone development with far-reaching implications…

 
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