ASP offerings provide cost savings in both software and hardware, argues Michael Yap, general manager at electronic documentation company, CrimsonLogic.
"The way I see it most people will be outsourcing their requirements--and that's where the ASP model will come in," Yap said.
Yap believes that in south-east Asia, companies are tending towards outsourcing, due to a desire to concentrate on their core solutions.
A few years ago the dot-com bust had a negative impact, Yap said. He believes that advances in areas such as broadband will also encourage businesses in Australia to use ASPs.
Rolf Jester, Gartner's chief analyst for IT services, Asia Pacific, descibes the hype cycle that ASPs went through, which inevitably resulted in inflated expectations.
Jester said it's not unusual for technologies or business models to go through this cycle, and eventually pull out of it into a "plateau of productivity".
According to Jester, what we've begun to see on a small scale throughout the Asia-Pacific region is software vendors, service providers and other companies delivering their applications in an ASP-like way.
Jester used the example of a company in Singapore, which he couldn't name, that had a number of solutions, which it was targeting at different verticals. -Instead of offering it as an in-house solution, they're offering it online because they're a trusted name to customers in that industry," Jester said.
Jester said that the ASP model did still offer a compelling business model. -In the past, although users were very attracted to the idea, they laid down stringent, but realistic, business conditions," he said. These included questioning companies providing applications via the ASP model about who they were, and whether they could be trusted.
