Weekly Review: Web Services New Tree in Same Forest

It's human nature to want some certainty in an uncertain world, and one of the ways we achieve a sense of certainty is by naming things. We feel that we have some control over something once we can put a label to it — naming turns the unknown into the familiar.

But sometimes, premature naming can lull us into a false sense of security. A misapplied or inadequate label may mislead us as to the true nature of a thing, lending an aura of validity and permanence to ill-conceived first impressions.

The Buzz That Was ASP
Three years ago this month, many of the participants of the ASP industry came together at a conference held alongside HP's user conference in San Francisco. With close to 800 attending, the iASP Forum blew away its more modest expectations of 200 to 300 delegates, and there was a real buzz in the air as attendees met their peers in the young industry, many for the first time.

Read and React

"Thousands of companies provide software in an ASP mode, yet they're seen as content management vendors, collaboration software vendors, e-commerce providers or simply online services. The mistake the early industry made was to declare itself as a breed apart, when in fact the ASP model has become just an alternative way of making software available to customers." Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum

But I was puzzled, when I moderated a town meeting laid on for its members at the event by the ASP Industry Consortium, to discover how strongly many of the participants wanted to establish a definition of what was meant by the term application service provider. I felt it was enough that they all saw themselves as part of a single movement. Since they knew they were ASPs, why did it need any more definition than that?

This was partly naivety on my part, not realizing how defining the sector and quantifying the market opportunity was a requirement for securing meaningful venture capital funding. I fondly imagined that venture capital investment was about taking risks, and that this meant investing money in a sector before anyone can safely define and size the market opportunity. But it seems that many investors at the time were looking to win risk-premium rewards for investments that they imagined to be risk-free, and so the industry's startups needed to present an image of certainty, even if none existed.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I think I was right to be wary of defining the term prematurely. That early insistence on defining application service providers helped create the schism that later sprung up between outsourcers and net-native ASPs, who went on to form their own Internet Business Service Providers group. At the same time, it crystallized people's thinking about ASPs solely in terms of outsourcing existing applications, whereas the more interesting developments came when software developers created new generations of web-delivered services.

Three Years Later and No Consensus
The paradoxical result of these early miscalculations is that, three years later, there's still no real consensus on the meaning of the term ASP, even though it's in common usage. Thousands of companies provide software in an ASP mode, many of them exclusively, and yet most of them are not seen as ASPs. Instead they're content management vendors, collaboration software vendors, e-commerce providers, or simply online services. The mistake the early industry made was to declare itself as a breed apart, when in fact the ASP model has become just an alternative way of making software available to customers.

I was reminded of all this recently when I noticed that people are starting to debate what we really mean by the term Web services. They're saying the term is too vague, that it encompasses all kinds of services delivered over the Web, when it should be used in the much narrower sense of specific application services founded on a recognized set of industry-endorsed protocols.

Albeit with the best of intentions, this search for orthodox respectability risks channelling Web services into a self-created ghetto, cut off from the most vibrant and exciting exponents of the technology through over-eagerness to adopt a neat and tidy definition, sanitized to be acceptable to the enterprise market and to venture capital investors.

I have an image in my mind of successive bands of explorers wandering through a huge, marvelous forest, trying to work out which tree they should be looking for, not realizing that what they've discovered is the forest. Three years ago, a group of them came looking for the ASP tree, and now a larger band is trying to locate the Web services tree. All the while, they're wandering among the limitless possibilities of a network that connects computers, software, businesses and users together in a single, seamless universe. And still they can't see the forest for the trees.

Tools:

Add aspnews.com to your favorites Add aspnews.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x

Back to Analyst Columns