Tim Howell’s Weblog

As Rod reports, IBM is the latest vendor to revitalise the concept of ASPs, making a couple of acquisitions to progress its On Demand strategy. Having been in the ASP business, albeit with limited success, the potential to deliver functional applications over the web has always existed. With the innovation of companies such as Salesforce.com, and the availability of broadband, amongst other things, this potential is starting to be realised.
On paper, ASP-delivered applications should be of interest to smaller organisations which have limited financial and IT resources. The issue is not so much about how much funcitonality is available, but more to do with return on investment and control: organisations need to be assured the financial cost of paying on a month by month or “per click” basis makes sense in the long term, and they need the ability to take things in house or have access to the data, should they desire. The leading ASP, or software as a service, providers are doing this and now becoming genuine competitors to the traditional vendors.
Taking this concept to the next stage, and coupling the investment of IBM with the activities of Google, for example, and it won’t be too long before the desktop is dead.