Foreword
A fundamental shift is occurring in the way businesses are using information technology to gain operational efficiencies and strategic advantages. A new information-processing paradigm called Application Service Provider (ASP) is changing the dynamic of business application delivery and management. ASP offers businesses' needs to operate their own information resources and manage hired staffs. ASP substitutes usage fees for businesses' capital outlays for technology, facilitates, and staff. Finally, ASP provides higher levels of service allowing businesses to focus more on their core competencies rather than running their own IT.
This book doesn't pretend to be "scientific" about ASP. The ASP industry is young and novel, and little knowledge has been accumulated about it to suffice for a scientific inquiry. Thus, the book is more qualitative. Focusing more on spotting trends than on measuring them, it pursues a commonsense correctness over scientific accuracy. Over time, however, this situation is bound to change and other books should be written on the quantitative effects of ASP. This author only timidly hopes to participate in that process.
ASPs are complex, both in business sense and technologically. Along with their high potential comes ample confusion. This book attempts to alleviate some of this confusion by defining the ASP terminology and frameworks to address what ASP really is, who is involved, and how to build it. This book provides:
- ASP definition, genesis, economics; current trends, future directions, problems
- Types of ASP services, their competitive advantages, value propositions
- ASP designs, architectures, methodologies, and enabling technologies
The business models, technical architectures, methodologies, tools and other ideas described in this book should help different ASP stakeholders to design their ASP strategies. These stakeholders include computer and communications hardware vendors, software resellers, and other companies participating in the business IT value chain. The book should also appeal to potential ASP users as it shows how ASP can help their businesses meet numerous business challenges such as these:
- Reduce the investment and operational costs of IT computing.
- Provide a greater ease of use and improved user productivity.
- Support connectivity, portability, and utility of computing.
- Build for flexibility, scalability, reliability, and availability of computing.
The book draws heavily from the author's own experience building "first-comer" ASPs. This experience--combined with the collective knowledge of his respective organization, Sun Professional Services, and numerous colleagues in the Internet service industries--is distilled into the pages of this book.
