TOP 50

November 13, 2003

There are a host of changes in this month's Top 50, starting with the biggest change -- we've reconfigured the makeup of the two lists to include the Top 25 Providers and Top 25 Enablers, instead of the previous 20/30 split. We did this not just for the sake of symmetry, but rather because the recent upsurge in activity from Enablers makes this seem like the right time for a change. In addition, expanding the list allowed us to include two European Enablers who had been lingering just off our Top 20 list for a while.

Of course, this reorganization means that we had to pare the Providers list by 5, which we did by removing Cisco, Grand Central, Interland, Novell and Verisign. This is by no means a reflection of our opinion of the quality of companies overall, but rather our opinion of their relative importance to the ASP industry (See ASPnews Top 50 Criteria).

We also decided to move two companies across to the Enablers side (Groove Networks and Ultimate Software), reflecting their evolving business models. This cleared spots for two more Enablers, which we filled with Data Return and VMware.

Data Return was a founding member of our Top20 list back in April 2001, but lost its spot in January 2002 when it was acquired by divine. Since then, divine has dissolved, Data Return has re-emerged as a profitable company, and we feel that the company has earned back its spot on our list. (For more details on Data Return's trials and tribulations, see The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Data Return.)

VMware is an infrastructure provider whose VirtualCenter virtual infrastructure management software should prove to be a key technology in utility computing. VMware has divorced the hardware from the software management, allowing the hardware to be managed as one large pool, similar to the virtual machine technology developed for mainframes. See (Virtualization Comes to the Fore...Again.)

On the Enablers side, we started by removing UpShot, which was acquired by Siebel Systems this month. We then moved Groove Networks and Ultimate Software from the Enablers list to the Providers list, as it seemed to be a better fit for their current focus of services.

To round out the remaining four spots, we went with two new additions and two companies returning to our list. OpenAir and TeleComputing return to the list, each having been displaced from our list in the past, while Aspective and EmailLabs join our list for the first time.

The choices were not easy, which is a good thing for the industry. Instead of struggling to find 25 Providers and 25 Enablers worthy of honoring, we found ourselves in a position of having too many companies to choose from. There's no better sign that the industry is on its way back up.

The presence of so many quality companies lurking just outside our Top 50 means that we'll surely be seeing some movement on the lists in the near future. As those second-tier companies grow stronger, as our Top 50 companies weaken or change focus, and as the industry itself continues to evolve, ASPnews will be there to keep our readers updated with the latest news about the companies that matter.

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