Corey Ferengul, a senior analyst at Meta Group, remains skeptical about the long-term prospects for ASP aggregators. He doubts that any aggregator will ultimately be able to achieve the "critical mass" it needs to be able to afford to support large numbers of customers using many ASPs.

Candle has announced an integration "backplane," called the CandleNet Roma eBusiness Platform, designed to let IT departments integrate multiple hosted applications with one another, as well as with their own enterprise systems. According to Ferengul, Candle's architecture has some advantages. "With conventional enterprise application integration, you have to create separate links between every pair of applications you want to integrate," he says. "The idea with Roma is that enterprises and ASPs only have to do that work once."

Brent Frei, CEO of CRM developer Onyx Software, suggests yet another approach to integrating multiple ASPs. Rather than relying on an ASP aggregator such as Jamcracker or an integration architecture such as Candle's, Frei says an ASP application itself can function as an integration point for a variety of online and internal information resources.

Onyx's Customer Portal lets users combine various enterprise and online information resources into a single browser view, Frei says. For example, a sales rep can supplement the customer data that the Onyx software provides with an online travel and entertainment application provided by Captura Software Inc., an ASP in Bothell, Wash., and online maps from MapInfo Corp. in Troy, N.Y. "The portal links the rep's travel-and-entertainment entries to that particular client, and it automatically pops up a map for that client's location," Frei says. "That context sensitivity is an example of real integration between multiple ASP resources, not just providing a common interface."

Still another approach to integrating multiple online services is offered by Silverback Technologies Inc. in Billerica, Mass., which specializes in IT management solutions. In Silverback's case, a management-integration server is installed on the customer's premises. The server installation and configuration is handled entirely by Silverback, which then collects and delivers management data to the customer. Like other ASP aggregators, Silverback uses its own set of XML definitions to integrate the applications it provides, which include Adventnet for alert handling, Network Associates' Cybercop for security, and RiverSoft's network-discovery tools.

Silverback's use of a customer-premises server is indicative of the fact that IT managers aren't necessarily fussy about how ASPs accomplish their objective, as long as the result is a zero-hassle, flat-fee solution. "The main thing for me is that Silverback is entirely responsible for everything, from the hardware to the updates, and that I can add additional functionality on an as-needed basis," says Ken Kleiner, systems manager at the University of Massachusetts. "The fact that they're using XML or something else to do the integration isn't really an issue for me."

In fact, according to Laurie McCabe, a senior analyst at market-research firm Summit Strategies, many IT shops aren't going to ask for much integration at all. "A lot of people are focused on just offloading some work to an outside vendor," she says. "They might want some very basic integration between a payroll app and their financials, but that's about it."

Those who are looking for more sophisticated integration, says McCabe, may be best off turning to the systems integrator-reseller channel, which has traditionally played that role in the IT ecosystem. "They also have to add value by helping their customers select the right apps for their business needs," she says, "and integrating those various apps into a complete business solution."

The multi-ASP challenge is likely to spawn a new breed of reseller-integrator--one that doesn't focus on selling hardware or software, but rather on building customized packages of Web-based resources culled from ASPs and other partner-suppliers.

"If we've learned anything from the enterprise resource planning software debacles of recent years, it's that you can't take software that's inherently complex and just install it overnight," says Onyx Software's Frei. "For the ASP model to work, you need software that's designed for easy customization and optimized for delivery over the Web. And you still need someone who's very familiar with that software to help you get it up and running."