Plugging in to Hosted Applications
Choosing The Right Service Provider For Your Web Site
By Mike Thompson
As a corporate or independent Web developer you're likely finding yourself pressed to the limit just to maintain the status quo, let alone deal with increased demands to turn what was once a static corporate-brochure site into a leading-edge community-building Web site. At one time your main task was adding new content to the site, but now you're likely to have to quickly add new applications as well. But adding applications -- even a mundane message board -- is much more difficult and time consuming than adding static content. As a result, the talent needed to maintain a Web site is rapidly expanding beyond designers to include programmers, database specialists, hardware technicians, and even quality assurance engineers -- talent that's extremely hard to attract and retain in today's tight job market.
As a result, a new software niche is forming -- the hosted application service provider (ASP). Although you may be more familiar with the acronym ASP being associated with Microsoft's Active Server Page technology, for better or worse ASP is also being used in the industry to describe companies offering hosted applications. Just as ISPs of all sizes have enabled millions of Web sites to be hosted on countless servers, hosted application service providers will give millions of Web developers access to specific applications that can be tightly woven into any Web site. As the name implies, a hosted application is essentially a software application running on a remote server that is distributed to customers as a free or paid subscription.<>
