www.aspnews.com/analysis/analyst_cols/article.php/403191
By Phil Wainewright June 26, 2000 Most of the companies currently piling into the ASP marketplace have little idea what they are getting into. The familiarity of the once-obscure ASP acronym has bred complacency, and today's received wisdom is that the ASP model is simply a subscription-based variation on application outsourcing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be porting applications across to third-party data centres and licensing them on monthly terms. Low telecommunications costs, coupled with advances in remote management technologies and thin client architectures, have made this an increasingly viable mode of application delivery. There are clear cost-of-ownership and time-to-market benefits in putting this new spin on the long-established practice of IT outsourcing. But it's only the first step in the journey of ASP evolution. As experienced practitioners have discovered, adopting the ASP model is far more than a simple relocation exercise. Once applications move off the customer premises into the network, a whole range of new possibilities come into play. This is because ASPs, by their nature, exploit the underlying technology infrastructure of network computing. They bring together all the potential of the n-tier server model, of software componentisation and application-level messaging, within a wide area network infrastructure that is easily connected to multiple providers. In this new environment, it is only a matter of time before applications start taking advantage of the potential for collaborative computing across the network. It becomes natural to source the best code, the fastest producers, wherever they happen to be. These economic imperatives drive application service providers to create integrated portfolios and aggregate them together with services from other providers. But today's software applications are poorly adapted to this fast-moving, co-operative computing model. They were built for a more predictable, LAN-based environment, in an era when enterprises planned their customisation and integration needs over months and years rather than from week to week. Such client-server applications must either adapt to their new surroundings, or be pushed aside by more nimble competitors. Microsoft gets it Very few software vendors - and only a minority of ASPs - have fully understood the implications of this new model of computing. A notable exception is Microsoft. With its .Net announcements this week, it has made clear that it is already well-advanced along a path that many others have barely begun to notice. In fact Microsoft woke up some time ago to the direction in which computing has been moving, and ASPnews.com has led the way in reporting that transition. We were the first to reveal, back in February last year, that Microsoft was planning a move to subscription-based licensing (see Microsoft to allow apps rental, Feb 1st, 1999). When Bill Gates changed his job title in February this year, my column explained straight away that the main reason was to free his time to direct the creation of a new net-centric architecture (see Chief Architect of Software-as-Services, Feb 2000). By the way, much of what Microsoft said in its .Net announcements about the future of software will have come as no surprise to long-term readers of ASPnews.com publications. This is what Bill Gates said on Thursday: "Our goal is to move ... to an Internet of interchangeable components where devices and services can be assembled into cohesive, user-driven experiences."And this is what I wrote in November 1998 in the ASPnews.com special report, Packaged Software Rental: The Net's Killer App: "Within a few years, users ... will access the applications they need, on demand, from online providers who will charge them by the second for the precise value of the specific features and resources they choose to use."As you can see, Microsoft has just about caught up with the vision first laid out in that early ASP report, remaining mute only on the difficult question of payment. End of an era But while Microsoft is well ahead of most of the industry, it is still some distance behind a growing band of startups and born-again ventures that embraced the net-centric model as early as two to three years ago. These smaller rivals have taken the lead in developing the tools, standards and technologies that will build the new architecture of Internet-based collaborative computing. The ingredients of the new architecture that is now taking shape, and the contributions being made both by Microsoft and by its new-wave competitors are the subject of a new ASPnews.com report to be published in a few days' time, Internet Application Engines. While many remain blissfully unaware of the changes about to be unleashed by the onset of this next generation of computing, Microsoft at least has had the foresight to acknowledge that we have reached the end of the PC era. It believes it has the necessary resources of finance and skills to catch up and overtake its next-generation rivals, and it is determined to move fast to cover the intervening ground. But all the while its capacity to act fast enough to dominate this new computing landscape will be handicapped by the need to protect and service a legacy product and customer base. Its startup competitors may yet find themselves in a position to gain the upper hand in what promises to be a hard-fought contest. |