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ASPs Wake Up to Collaborative Computing
By Phil Wainewright
April 20, 2001

For the past two years, the ASP industry has been laboring under an illusion. Only now are the majority of participants waking up to reality. At the time, it was a natural mistake for the first generation of ASPs to make. They came from the IT industry and they saw the Internet. What could be more obvious than taking the applications they knew and putting them on the Internet?

Aided and encouraged by their software vendor allies, they set out to take those familiar enterprise and desktop apps and relocate them into Internet data centers. They believed that, by managing applications at centralized, consolidated facilities, they would save their customers money — as well as do a better job of it than their customers were managing to do on their own.

Up to a point, they were right. Some customers saved money or sidestepped IT skills shortages. Others speeded up their adoption of new technologies and applications. But it wasn't making enough of a difference to set the world alight, and most customers decided that moving to an outsourced model just wasn't worth the disruption and risk.

Already Out There
Instead of trying to move applications out of enterprises and off the desktop, those early ASPs should have taken a closer look at what was already happening out there on the Internet. The Internet industry was pioneering the deployment of computing based on web servers, e-commerce servers, messaging servers and a host of other web-based application servers.

These emerging platforms powered a new generation of collaborative applications and services, such as information sharing, online trading, self-service administration and integrated value chains. They didn't need to be relocated to the Internet because that was where they belonged in the first place. And they didn't need ASPs because they were already being hosted in Internet data centers.

ASPs had been laboring under the illusion that it was their mission to move computing onto the Internet. What they had failed to realise was that it was already out there. Now it is heading their way.

Then There were Three
As ASP have found, there is more than one way to deliver applications. Inf fact, today's computing landscape comprises three distinct forms of computing. Each is ideally suited to its own specific sets of applications, and works best in its preferred location.

  • Desktop computing operates applications that need to be close to the user. When individuals are creating documents, analyzing information or learning new skills, they want to interact with the data right there in front of them. It doesn't make sense to transmit it back and forth across the network while they're focussed on that task, because that only introduces distractions. They just want to get the job done.
  • Enterprise computing is concerned with planning, organizing and managing tasks in predefined, closed groups. If those groups all work in the same building, what's the point of outsourcing the computing to some other location? Security, efficiency and cost considerations all argue in favor of keeping it behind the same closed doors.
  • Collaborative computing comes into play when individuals and organizations need to share, trade and communicate with each other. It doesn't make sense to run these applications anywhere else but in the Internet, using a secure, shared infrastructure that's easily accessible to every participant.
These are three distinct forms of computing, but that doesn't mean they each operate in isolation from the others. There are real benefits to be gained from linking them up, so that the triple forces of human creativity, organization and collaboration can all reinforce and amplify each other.

The Collaborative Web
That's why the Internet is seeping into the enterprise and onto the desktop, meshing these existing forms of computing into the emerging infrastructure of collaborative computing. People don't always call it the Internet. Enterprises like to think of it as their own in-house intranet, and to individual users it's just whatever they log on to. But make no mistake: This is the same IP-based network infrastructure that stretches all the way from every individual PC to every other connected device around the globe.

It has been MSPs rather than ASPs who have been the first to recognize the opportunities presented by these developments. They started out providing services to monitor and manage the new Internet-based web servers that enterprises were setting up in Internet data centers. Now they are using the emerging shared Internet infrastructure to reach into enterprises and manage computing within the enterprise and on the desktop — for example, this week's news story, Loudcloud Aims Inside the Enterprise.

This collaborative approach to managing the underlying shared infrastructure will soon be emulated by ASPs. A shared applications infrastructure is beginning to take shape, layered over the emerging shared Internet systems infrastructure. The true mission of ASPs is to operate and manage that shared, collaborative web of applications as it reaches out across the Internet and deep within each individual enterprise.