ASPs urged to remember their service roots

By Dan Briody

InfoWorld, 11/03/99

DENVER -- The ASP Summit conference kicked off here Tuesday with visions of a ballooning application service provider (ASP) marketplace and a litany of steps to be taken to facilitate an anticipated shift back toward centralized computing.

Trevor Greun-Kennedy , chairman of the ASP Consortium, led off the two-day conference by imploring ASPs to remember their roots as the market explodes over the next two years.

"Remember the key value proposition and that your middle name is service," said Greun-Kennedy. "This business is all about services and removing the complexity from the end-user."

The ASP Consortium has grown from 25 to more than 200 member companies in just six months. "In 2001, there is no question this will become mainstream," Greun-Kennedy said. "ASPs hold the promise to deliver applications anywhere, to anything, across any network."

Following Greun-Kennedy's keynote speech, Debbie Harris, vice president of global marketing at Lucent Technologies, provided her vision of how ASPs will need to address this fast-growing market going forward.

Harris threw a new acronym into the mix when she referenced the emerging trend of TSPs, total service providers, that supply end-to-end solutions, with everything from application hosting to Internet access services to hardware sales and service.

But Harris warned that successful service providers will be ones that specialize in vertical markets and focus on serving customers' specific needs.

"There needs to be a focus on vertical markets," said Harris. "And a seamless integration of various ASP players [with varying expertise] is crucial."

Harris went on to list the results of a survey, conducted by Lucent, of many of the key participants in the ASP industry. Among repondents' top concerns was the issue of reliability and a lack of a standard for network quality of service.

Also on the list of concerns was end-user education, with many industry players citing the difficulty of convincing a large company to outsource a mission-critical application. Rounding out the list were network security and bandwidth concerns.