InformationWeek

November 13, 2000

Business/IT:
ASPs Are Reality, Not A Dream

Companies will soon have to decide if using an application service provider is in the best interest of their customers

Bob Evans few months ago, on a trip through the San Francisco Bay area to visit some companies new and old, I was introduced to an incredibly energetic, fresh-scrubbed and eager entrepreneur who was just about exploding out of his buttons as our conversation began. As our respective groups said hello and made our various introductions, I was trying to figure if this guy had just had a 96-ounce cup of black coffee, or was it a new strain of ginkgo biloba, or did he think I was an institutional investor--or what?

And then, with all the introductions almost but not quite complete, he blurted it out in a torrent that blew everybody's hair back a bit: "Hey! So glad you're here because we want to tell you about our new market strategy and we think it's really going to make people think and rethink their viability in the service-provider space because while you have ISP and ASP and MSP and XSP, we're the first--are your ready for this??--FSASP!!"

He was smiling at me with an almost otherworldly intensity and was actually vibrating a bit with a degree of earnestness that was infectious, but I tried to stay at least a little bit detached and information-pursuant, so I replied, "Well that's really terrific and congratulations and I don't want to pee on your parade, but I'm a little slow--so can you tell me exactly what an FSASP is?"

The poor overwound guy pretty much instantaneously exploded back at me, "Well that's what we're so excited about--nobody knows what it means until we tell them. And then after we tell them, of course, they get it because FSASP stands for Full-Service Application Service Provider!" and he nodded at me with great confidence as if he'd said that if I just breathe in, then I'll have oxygen in my lungs.

In his rush of emotion and energy and adrenaline, I tried to steady myself against this epiphaniacal onslaught, and perhaps because I was leery of getting caught up in his messianic fervor, I blurted out, "Well that's better than being an HAASP!"

His eyes bugged out a bit and he screamed, "What's an HAASP?" Just before I passed out, I howled, "It's a Half-Assed Application Service Provider!"

I awoke in the backseat of the car, temples hammering, on our way to the next appointment--sweaty palms, total disorientation, accelerated heart rate--bad lamb at lunch? Jet lag? Swine flu? ASP overload? I closed my eyes and tried to think of ambulances and actuarial equations and training films, anything to make me calm down. Mercifully, sleep washed once more over me. ... ASPs jumping over a fence ... didn't the asp once terrorize Egypt? ... ASP ... ASAP ... ASAP ASPs?? ... Awfully Silly Pretensions??

Yeah, this ASP stuff is dreamy, but it ain't no dream. Trouble is, while it's nice to let the weirdness and complexity of it knock us into Never-Never Land rather than make a decision, the sands of time wait for no one and sooner or later--and sooner seems a lot wiser--all of us are going to have to pony up to this one and decide if we're in or out. A few thoughts, then, for those who choose to mull it over while awake:

Why is Hewlett-Packard reconsidering its acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers? Is it the price, or the business model?

Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams (maybe let's not go there), a hard-charging 21st-century business saying, "What I need is an application service provider." If you can, maybe you'd better go back to sleep; if not, try to think how this idea/concept/value proposition is best expressed not in the language of the computer industry but rather in the language of the customer.

Is software a product? A service? What happens when software vendors that have already signed up a whole lot of service providers to offer their stuff suddenly start to become service providers themselves?

How can you use all this uncertainty to not just keep up but indeed to leapfrog competitors unwilling or afraid to deal with this very weird ASP thing that keeps going bump in the night?