Weekly Review: The ASP (Silent) Killer App
By Phil Wainewright
May 21, 2002
Anyone reading this article will probably be surprised to learn that many active Internet users never spend a second of their working day in front of a browser. For large numbers of people around the world, e-mail is their primary interface to the online world.
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| "We can extrapolate from what people are doing with e-mail to predict trends for other applications as they too move over to an Internet (or Web services) platform. According to Sean Sears, CEO of Abridean, 'the main core of service providers are looking for Exchange, but they're looking for add-ons to make it more compelling," such as wireless access and support for instant messaging.' Give us your feedback in the ASPnews Discussion Forum |
At work, far more people have e-mail access than a Web browser — indeed, many employers see browser access as an unproductive distraction rather than part of the job. They'd much rather see their staff concentrate on completing their tasks — one of which, of course, is responding to e-mail. Even among home users, e-mail is far and away the most popular application, used by up to 90 percent of the users who have Internet access on their home PCs (see e-mail Still the Killer App For Internet Users).
So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that e-mail is the most popular hosted application, both for individuals and for corporations. Web-based e-mail is readily available from portals and service providers, while hosted enterprise e-mail is offered by many ASPs and outsourcers.
Hosted E-Mail Now Packaged and Ready to Deploy
All the necessary ingredients are now in place for a further acceleration in the adoption of hosted e-mail. Last week, Microsoft introduced its previously announced hosted messaging and collaboration solution for service providers. This is a preconfigured package of Microsoft software and Compaq server hardware, which has been tested and validated as ready for rapid deployment by service providers. The provision of hosted e-mail is no longer a specialist art. It's now packaged as a mainstream commodity, capable of being deployed rapidly and cheaply by any competent service provider.
The willingness to launch services is there, too, among a service provider community that has previously held back from taking the plunge. AT&T Canada's plans to launch a hosted Exchange service was an example of this renewed enthusiasm, according to Sean Sears, CEO of its provisioning software partner Abridean: "In 2002, the market has come alive and is showing signs of adoption." — see Abridean Gets the Call with AT&T Canada.
That perception is born out by deals struck by Microsoft's other provisioning software partner for the Exchange solution, Xevo, and by the first two service providers to be signed up, Apptix and United Messaging.
Hosted E-mail Offers a Glimpse of the Future
The confidence in rising demand is justified. E-mail is the first enterprise application that has crossed the line from being a largely internal application to become an important platform for what people call the extended enterprise. It sustains critical communications with suppliers, partners and customers, as well as remaining an important channel for internal communications. This gives it a combination of characteristics that make it a compelling proposition as a hosted service, and which gives important clues as to what to watch for when spotting future killer apps for service providers:
- It is already heavily dependent on the public Internet infrastructure, so migrating to a hosted service is less of a leap in the dark than it would be for applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), which are still largely confined within the enterprise infrastructure.
- From a user's point of view, this is a very simple, easy-to-learn application that they use sporadically throughout the day as an integral part of their working routine.
- From an enterprise point of view, this is a business-critical, always-on application that's deceptively difficult to manage.
- New capabilities and threats such as wireless access and viruses make it more complex day-by-day.
Looking ahead, we can extrapolate from what people are doing with e-mail to predict trends for other applications as they too move over to an Internet (or Web services) platform. According to Sears, "the main core of service providers are looking for Exchange, but they're looking for add-ons to make it more compelling," such as wireless access and support for instant messaging.
They prefer a rich client on the local device, like Outlook, interacting with core shared data on the Exchange server, rather than turning to browser-based in-box applications where the data stays firmly on the server. It seems users still want to be able to download data and work disconnected from the network. But the need to protect that data means that Microsoft ought to add support for replication and sychronization, so that the server can keep a master copy of downloaded data.
Put It All Together and It Spells ....
Combine all of those features, and the emerging shape of hosted e-mail gives us a clear profile of next-generation hosted applications. In business environments, they enable essential tasks within the extended enterprise. They are must-have, instantly accessible functions, always-on even when disconnected. They run on a variety of client devices, and are easily extended with add-on capabilities. Central servers co-ordinate data integrity and user administration. They run over the Internet, but they don't need a browser.
The last feature is probably the most striking of all. The browser is so closely associated in our minds with the Internet that we tend to forget we're using the same underlying infrastructure when we do e-mail — and most of us probably spend more time working in our e-mail inbox than using the browser.
Our e-mail use is telling us that in the future, more and more Internet activity will be in Web-based applications rather than in the browser. Indeed, future generations will probably look back and wonder why on earth we spent so much of our time idly looking at the Web instead of actually using it.
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