(2002-07-25) c

Stewart Alsop says ASP providers will succeed if they focus on non-core IT infrastructure. Corporate CIOs hate the ASP model. Since IT departments are rewarded for not screwing up, they almost always prefer licensing software and running it themselves to renting from a small, perpetually underfunded company... There are a couple of ASP-style companies now doing good business. Their secret is that they don't rent services that are core to corporate IT; they don't try to get companies to trust the heart of their computing to someone else. Instead, they have shown IT managers that they can do a terrific job running discrete applications.