Concepts and Dynamics of the Application Service Provider Industry

Author(s):  
Dohoon Kim

The enterprise intelligence through e-transformation is one of the cornerstones of the next-generation e-business era where the Internet constitutes the core business resource. Furthermore, the severe competitive landscape of e-business makes firms focus on their core capability and farm out staffing functions such as IT. Under this circumstance, enhancing intelligence and synergy through e-transformation will be accomplished by IT outsourcing via ASPs (application service providers). The ASP industry now provides an essential infrastructure for the Internet-based e-business transactions, thereby accelerating corporate e-transformation.

Author(s):  
Christoph Bussler

Application service providers (ASPs) are a new type of service providers that make the whole spectrum from low-end applications like e-mail systems to high-end applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) management systems available to customers over the Internet through browser-based user interfaces (application hosting). This relieves a customer from installing and managing the applications himself in his own data center. Instead, the customer pays a fee for accessing the application over the Internet. However, as soon as a customer uses several applications hosted by different ASPs, a management burden arises for the customer as well as an application integration problem, since the applications are hosted individually by several ASPs without any coordination or data exchange between them. The arising integration (aggregation) problems are discussed in this chapter. An ASP aggregation architecture is defined based on B2B integration servers that address these problems by supporting the seamless access and seamless integration of all hosted applications hiding the differences between the ASPs.


2010 ◽  
pp. 44-49
Author(s):  
Dohoon Kim

The enterprise intelligence through e-transformation is one of the cornerstones of the next-generation e-business era where the Internet constitutes the core business resource. Furthermore, the severe competitive landscape of e-business makes firms focus on their core capability and farm out staffing functions such as IT. Under this circumstance, enhancing intelligence and synergy through e-transformation will be accomplished by IT outsourcing via ASPs (application service providers). The ASP industry now provides an essential infrastructure for the Internet-based e-business transactions, thereby accelerating corporate e-transformation. An ASP is generally defined as a third-party service firm that deploys, manages, and/or remotely hosts a software application through centrally located servers in a lease agreement. ASPs started their business by providing online application programs such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) solution packages to corporate customers. The first customers were small companies or local branches of multinational companies where IT outsourcing was the only option to deploy IT resources due to financial or regional constraints. As seen in these cases, the biggest merit of employing ASPs is that corporate customers do not have to own the applications and take responsibilities associated with initial and ongoing support and maintenance. Consequently, ASPs are differentiated from the existing IT services in that ASPs provide IT resources to multiple corporate clients on a oneto- many basis with a standardized service architecture and pricing scheme.


Author(s):  
Dohoon Kim

The enterprise intelligence through e-transformation is one of the cornerstones of the next-generation e-business era where the Internet constitutes the core business resource. Furthermore, the severe competitive landscape of e-business makes firms focus on their core capability and farm out staffing functions such as IT. Under this circumstance, enhancing intelligence and synergy through e-transformation will be accomplished by IT outsourcing via ASPs (application service providers). The ASP industry now provides an essential infrastructure for the Internet-based e-business transactions, thereby accelerating corporate e-transformation. An ASP is generally defined as a third-party service firm that deploys, manages, and/or remotely hosts a software application through centrally located servers in a lease agreement. ASPs started their business by providing online application programs such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) solution packages to corporate customers. The first customers were small companies or local branches of multinational companies where IT outsourcing was the only option to deploy IT resources due to financial or regional constraints. As seen in these cases, the biggest merit of employing ASPs is that corporate customers do not have to own the applications and take responsibilities associated with initial and ongoing support and maintenance. Consequently, ASPs are differentiated from the existing IT services in that ASPs provide IT resources to multiple corporate clients on a oneto- many basis with a standardized service architecture and pricing scheme.


2001 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 323-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
WENDY L. CURRIE ◽  
PHILIP SELTSIKAS

This paper draws from the findings of a large-scale empirical research program on the global application service provider (ASP) industry funded by research grants from the European Commission (EC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). A conceptual framework consisting of a taxonomy of ASPs is used to demonstrate the different market segmentation strategies adopted by ASPs for competing in this fledgling and turbulent industry. Drawing from empirical research carried out in the US and Europe, the paper evaluates ASP strategies for deploying, hosting, managing and enabling software applications on behalf of their customers. The ASP business model is advocated as an attractive value proposition for SMEs, dot.com companies and other start-up firms seeking hyper-growth. Yet the evidence so far suggests a slow start to the ASP market as few reference sites demonstrating best practice exist. ASPs will therefore need to re-evaluate their strategies if they are to convince potential customers of the benefits of application outsourcing. Against this background, the paper evaluates the benefits and risks of the ASP model.


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