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Kickin' ASP June 12, 2000 By Fritz Nelson 
Brad Shimmin, our online editor, was in an airport bathroom recently when he heard two men talking between stalls about a particularly thorny employee. They decided the best solution was to charge the employee with e-enabling their applications within 12 months or else they'd fire him faster than a Cisco buying spree. Now this guy has two problems. First, he's got bosses who break a fundamental rule about talking in men's rest rooms. Second, he may have to turn to an ASP to save his job. Despite promises that you can just toss tasks over the wall more easily than lazy pop flies to left at Enron Field, despite promises of few worries, of cost savings and of quicker time to market, and despite promises of access to IT resources during a labor shortage tighter than my boss on expense reports, there are significant challenges in choosing an ASP. The first challenge is to sort through an ASP market as plentiful as bad Steven Seagal movies. Define an ASP. StoragePoint.com, which provides Internet storage, calls itself a "rapidly growing ASP." Back in my days at Lockheed Martin, we provided payroll processing for customers like Burger King. It was called time-sharing then. Corio, one of today's market-leading ASPs, has taken to calling itself--reluctantly--a "pure-play ASP." Although there may be important business implications for making the ASP decision, make no mistake, this is a technology decision, and it's a decision less about applications than the delivery of them. Everything you've ever cared about--scalability, reliability, performance, availability--is still important, even if you give it all up; in fact, because you aren't doing these things yourself, they're even more important. One IT manager we know of turned to an ASP to reduce liability. This company aggregates and massages terabytes worth of hospital patient data, which it sells to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Recent legislation controls and punishes any leakage of this data, so he figured he'd let the ASP worry about any potential problems. But who's to say an ASP can do better? In his column, David Willis, citing recent disasters, implores us to go back to basics when evaluating host providers. In our cover story on ASPs, Art Wittmann provides a checklist of items to consider and ask of your ASP--buying advice backed up by the risks and concerns you've identified in our research data. The ASP selection is also a challenge of trust, and in an emerging market, there's no such thing as track record. AT&T, MCI WorldCom and Sprint can't even put you in the right teleconference call reliably, and these companies and that technology have been around about as long as the NBA playoffs last. So are you ready to trust your financial applications to a company whose CEO just got his first pimple? Better go back to basics Host provider AboveNet went down recently, and rumor spread that the hack exploited weak password protection on the provider's router infrastructure--namely a discovered password that happened to work for every router on the network. Impure-play ASP? There's more, but this isn't a referendum on AboveNet or anyone in particular. I'm certain companies will build adequate track records through customers willing to take the risk. I'm more concerned about giving up control of strategic applications; our research shows it's your top concern. If these applications are so strategic, why give them up? Why put someone between you and your customer? Corio tells me some big, recognizable companies have handed over some strategic applications. But then Corio says it's formed some pretty tight partnerships with those companies. I hope so. This can't be about blind faith. Or you're just flushing your company down the toilet. --Fritz Nelson, fnelson@nwc.com
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