What is an ASP?

Introduction

As a growing number of companies discover every day, working with an application service provider (ASP) offers a number of valuable business benefits. These benefits include the potential to reduce information technology (IT) costs by 30 - 60% *, reduce time to market for new products and services, and more effectively allocate scarce resources.

To make it easier for you to leverage the benefits of the ASP delivery model, the ASP Industry Consortium, a not-for-profit international advocacy group dedicated to promoting ASP education and best practices, has developed this guide. It highlights key ASP-related issues, offers suggestions for evaluating ASPs and directs you to resources that can provide further information and assistance.

Definition

An ASP provides applications – and all the IT infrastructure and support services necessary to deliver them – to customers on a subscription basis. ASPs typically host applications at a remote data center and deliver them to customers via the Internet or a private network.

This basic definition, however, obscures some of the complexities found in today’s ASP marketplace. For example, while some ASPs have the internal resources to provide all the services necessary to deliver applications to customers, others provide only some of these services – such as application or network management – and work with complementary partners to deliver complete solutions to customers. In fact, some independent software vendors (ISVs) also operate as ASPs by partnering with companies that provide the necessary application-delivery, support and network management services. In addition, some ASPs provide services only to a specific vertical market, such as e-business or health care.

Many different types of companies now describe themselves as ASPs. Details

The ASP value chain is a breakdown of each of these types of ASPs and where their specific services fall. Details