Don't ASP, Don't Tell
By Lincoln D. Stein
The acronym of the season is ASP, which everyone knows by now means application service provider. Companies that market ASP products promote them as a way to reduce bloated IS departments, boost productivity, lower costs, and increase reliability, all the while promoting employee morale and whitening your teeth.
But seriously, what are ASPs good for, and when does it make sense to use them? The arguments for and against ASPs are similar to those of a half-decade ago, when the big debate was whether to set up a Web site in-house, or outsource it to an ISP or cohosting service. For a monthly fee, an ASP provides your company with access to one or more software services. The software may be something as simple as an email service for employees on the road, or as complex as an entire payroll system.
In recent years all sorts of traditional desktop software has been reincarnated in ASP form, including word processing programs, calendar applications, and databases. Startups are staking their fortunes on innovative ASP products, and established companies, like SAP, are repositioning themselves to take advantage of the ASP bonanza. Even Microsoft has gotten into the act. Microsoft.NET (although its positioning is a little hazy) sounds an awful lot like an ASP architecture.
Terms of use vary considerably, but under a typical agreement, your company leases access to software on servers owned by the ASP. The server side of the software runs on the ASP's machines, while the client side runs on a standard Web browser alone, or supplemented by plug-ins, Java applets, ActiveX components, and other client-side software.
