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October ASPnews Top 50 By ASPnews.com Staff October 8, 2002
Two software companies with very different backgrounds are this month’s new
entrants to our Top 20 Providers and Top 30 Enablers listings. The changing
shape of the software industry is also a factor in the departures of the two
companies they replace.
Sadly, our Top 20 Providers list this month loses one of the ASP industry’s
biggest success stories. Despite its impressive tally of 1.5 million
subscriber accounts and a profitable business, McAfee.com is no longer an
independent company after its parent Network Associates finally completed
the long drawn-out buyback of the shares issued in its IPO.
The vacancy is filled by a smaller but highly innovative ASP. Online
accounting software provider Intacct has been one of the few Internet-based
startups to have made a success of providing accounting software as a
service. Its sophisticated XML-based integration capabilities, modular
achitecture and flexible pricing model are all examples of its willingness
to innovate for market advantage.
Another factor in its success has been its
nurturing of accountants and systems integrators as sales and implementation
partners for its service. Continuing its evangelism for the net-native ASP
model, later this month Intacct will bring together many of those partners
to share and discuss best practice at its NetGain 2002 conference.
SAP and ASPs SAP now earns its place thanks to its embracing of the Web services
model, and in particular its innovative X-Apps technology, which is designed
to support business processes that cut across multiple applications from a
variety of vendors. The commitment to this new, modular view of business
software is a clear sign that SAP now gets the online model.
SAP’s arrival fills a vacancy created by the departure of Agiliti. The
company continues to provide a range of MSP and hosting services, but has
now de-emphasized the ASP-enabling services that were the reason for its
inclusion in the Top 30 Enablers list. Although software vendors are still
keen to offer hosted versions of their software, they no longer feel the
need to turn to a specialist enabler to help them achieve it — another sign
of how well-accepted the ASP model has become.
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