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By Phil Wainewright June 20, 2001 Intuit founder Scott Cook recently revealed to a gathering of fellow-alumni at Harvard Business School that the small business accounting software vendor is developing a new product that it calls a "work processor." This is effectively a suite of business administration tools, similar to that offered by Rivio or the now sadly defunct ASP pioneer eAlity.
It will be interesting to see if this Intuit project ever sees the light of day. But if it does, I doubt it will be successful. Cook's colleagues have forgotten the same thing that virtually every other software vendor and ASP forgets when it attempts to build products for the small business. Simple, cheap and fast are indeed essential attributes — but small businesses also expect flexibility. They don't want a cookie-cutter product. It must match their business — though still without the cost of customization, if it can be avoided. Which is why I bow to the superior wisdom of Phillip Actor, a friend from the industry and CEO of Multrix, currently finalizing its market offering as an ASP in The Netherlands. He recently emailed me in response to my recent column, ASP — A Step Beyond Outsourcing to point out that outsourcing is currently an important service for ASPs targetting small to mid-size businesses. Until online software services can truly offer flexibility, smaller businesses will prefer to stick with the trusted, flexible and familiar client-server software applications that they already have installed. And so ASPs have to provide an outsourcing service for those products to accommodate their needs.
Utility Processing The theory was that, although SSPs have so far been the only example of such providers, others were bound to emerge. If disk space and storage management can be provided on a pay-as-you-go basis, why shouldn't it be possible for other basic computing functions, particulary raw processing power, also to be available on demand? It was good to see the theory vindicated last week when Exodus announced an on-demand processing service. Exodus already has SSP options available to customers to host their server farms in its data centres. Now it has teamed up with utility computing startup Esajent, which will offer on-demand processing of Solaris-based applications on a pay-for-use basis. The Esajent service deploys its massive processing power as a single virtual server (VSS) that adaptively expands or contracts in real time to changing traffic load conditions. What this means for enterprises and ASPs is that, instead of having to build a processing infrastructure that will handle whatever they project their peak traffic to be, they can build for normal loads, and tap into the massive scalability of Esajent's hundreds of networked servers on an as-needed basis. Esajent says that this has enabled its charter customers to realize up to a 56 percent cost saving on their computing infrastructure. The Esajent example of enabling enterprises to offload processing to a ready-made, always-on provider infrastructure, and even schedule applications to run at off-peak times, is a marvellous illustration of the true economic benefits of Internet collaborative computing. Instead of wastefully building to peak capacity needs, online providers and enterprises can share resources such as processing and storage, utilizing the physical infrastructure much more cost-effectively. Server vendors will not be pleased. This review of the week's news highlights is by ASPnews.com founder and consulting analyst Phil Wainewright. A comprehensive news digest is published every month in the ASP News Review newsletter, available exclusively to subscribers. |