Kan het ASP model, ofwel Hosting of On Demand, dit keer wel doorbreken? De schrijver van dit artikel denkt van wel.(Engels)

Bron: eccs.uk.com

ECCS opinion: Hosting: can it break into the big time?

Back in the heady days of dot.com frenzy, application systems providers were set to conquer the world. Web-delivered software would be the answer to hard-pressed companies who did not want the hassle or expense of carrying the IT costs and management burden in-house. That time round, it didn’t happen. But now the concept, reborn as hosted software, has put down secure roots and is growing fast.
Gartner, for example, believes that a third of all US small and medium enterprises will opt for this route.

Many of the signs of a thriving sector are in place. With the market leader Salesforce.com blazing the way in the CRM marketplace, (see Salesforce.com scales new heights) a steady flow of newcomers have kept new business flowing. Not only that, but industry stalwarts including Siebel, who initially dismissed the upstart challenge as so much froth, have now signed up to the cause and are Salesforce.com’s most potent competitor.

All of this suggests a healthy competitive environment. Hosted software suppliers are busy enlarging their range of offerings and rapidly moving beyond the one-size-fits-all service of the early days. But the question remains whether hosted software will ever appeal to larger organizations. There are some awkward shoals to negotiate for the hosting industry.

Part of the reluctance of many larger organizations to embrace hinges on their more complex IT environments, the fact that they would face significant integration problems and satisfy other increasingly irksome issues such as security. The first could become a showstopper if hosting companies become sucked into major integration and patching exercises, the underlying simplicity of the proposition starts to fall apart. The costs and implementation delays start to mount and the plug and play advantages evaporate. If this is what playing in the enterprise market ends up like, hosting may rapidly look like traditional systems development: expensive, project bound, skills and technology intensive.

These problems, though, are less likely to bother an industry contemplating a 40 percent compound growth prospect that will, according to Gartner, mean that it will be worth $1 billion by 2009.