Eight application service providers (ASPs) have launched a forum to help educate users about issues surrounding application hosting. The ASP Forum members conceded that the ASP model has been over-hyped, and said they wanted to get customers more involved. The move is a response to continuing reluctance by many large organisations to turn their applications over to a hosted model.
"We want to get rid of the hype Â- the industry has suffered badly from it over the past year and a half," said Sean O'Reilly, vice president of marketing at ASP Forum member, Netstore.
Donna Bullock, ASP marketing manager at Microsoft, another forum member, said the hype is waning. "A lot of trials are going on, but turning those into wide deployments will take longer," said Bullock.
A recent ASP conference in Amsterdam attracted more than 300 people, but only four were customers, said O'Reilly. "The industry was talking to itself, using language that nobody else understood," he said.
The ASP Forum, which as yet has no Web site, hopes to address such issues, and help companies identify how the ASP model could be useful to their businesses, said O'Reilly. The ASP Forum will take a different approach to the ASP Industry Consortium (Aspic), which was inaugurated earlier this year. "Aspic's role is more technology-oriented, concentrating on best practices, high-discipline approaches, security and dispute resolution. It has set a great foundation to help both ASPs and their customers use due diligence in their business," commented O'Reilly.
O'Reilly is keen to see the ASP Forum grow into an end-user organisation. He cited a developer forum that he co-founded, called the DSDM Consortium, as an example of how the forum should grow. "Once users got into place and started taking over some of the group's committees, that's where it had real value," he said. "We would like to see the ASP Forum go the same way -- let the vendors step out after a while and put users into strong positions on committees."
ASPs hope the forum will help to attract large corporate customers in future. "The median number of seats in companies using ASPs is still around 500," said O'Reilly, "but that number is creeping upwards."
