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ASP Still Spells Confusion May 29, 2000 By DAVE MOLTA 
Every day, headlines tout the market potential for application service providers. But mention ASPs to IT professionals or business managers, and you'll get a look of confusion. ASPs haven't passed the acronym test yet. The ASP movement legitimizes a basic enterprise principle I've come to embrace: With few exceptions, applications cannot be effectively managed in a decentralized manner. It reminds me of mistakes I've made attempting to deliver a richer information environment--lessons ASPs should heed. I first learned about networking by managing network infrastructure and then by implementing and supporting departmental LANs. While I took it for granted that infrastructure required a centralized utility approach to management, I initially thought NOSes could be managed at the departmental level. I was wrong. At first, my LAN enthusiasm was shared by departmental business managers and their LAN administrators. But as system reliability diminished, reality set in. Effective decentralized LAN resource management was just too costly for most departments. In my next job, where departmental LANs were uncommon, I wouldn't make the same mistake. I introduced subscription-based LAN services built around Microsoft Windows 3.1 on the desktop and Novell NetWare on the back end--we called them "virtual LANs." For a modest monthly fee, users accessed a suite of personal and group productivity applications, gateway services to mainframe systems, personal and group server storage space and networked printing services. Immediately, we realized reliability was critical for effectiveness, so our network infrastructure supported a remote-boot environment--today we'd call it an appliance approach. Every binary, including the OS, was stored on NetWare servers and delivered to the desktop as needed. Entire departments subscribed to the service. When people shared information, they'd "save it to the G: drive"--the shared departmental storage area. Before long, we had more than 1,000 subscribers. We had always offered to help departments migrate to their own systems, but we had few takers. Although the service was popular, kinks developed. First, we faced the Windows 95 support challenge. Although we were proud of our system, which automatically upgraded Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, we had to abandon the remote-boot approach. Relinquishing control of the desktop OS resulted in significantly weakened reliability. When there were just a few hundred users, systems administrators handled most of the support. But as we scaled the service, this role was delegated to a helpdesk. Unfortunately, the environment was too complex for our inexperienced helpdesk, and the adoption of remote-control tools and support knowledge-bases didn't address the fundamental support-expertise issue. Managing applications was another significant challenge. We marketed the environment as a generic application service designed to meet most users' needs. But customizing it to serve unique application requirements was time-consuming and expensive. Once we introduced Windows 95, users started installing their own applications. The result? Hundreds of untrained systems administrators breaking their computers. Even centrally managed applications--whose upgrades were automated--faced timing issues. Some people wanted the latest version of Microsoft Office ASAP, while others wanted to stick with what they knew. We never established any kind of end-to-end service-level agreement. Instead, we were content touting the 99.9+ percent reliability of the network and back-end servers, conveniently ignoring the fact that desktop configuration issues were the root of most reliability problems. Sadly, the problems were attributed to the overall service rather than the misdeeds of individual users-turned-systems administrators. Can ASPs learn from my past? You make the call. Send your comments on this column to Dave Molta at dmolta@nwc.com.
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