Quelle: CIO Asia

In a world dominated by vendors providing one-to-one serviceofferings, application service providers (ASPs) and management serviceproviders (MSPs), whose services are targeted at and customised forthe mass market, remain a silent minority. However, more companies arebypassing the traditional service provision mode in which vendorscraft unique services and dedicate unique resources for them, toentrust their networks and applications to ASPs and MSPs. "They are aslowly rising trend," says Gartner chief analyst RolfJester.

ASPs and MSPs are very different creatures, although the twothree-letter acronyms are often used interchangeably. MSPs provide ITmanagement services for networks, desktops, et cetera, without anytransfer of the customers' applications to the service provider. ASPs,on the other hand, own the applications and provide customers accessto them.

Over the past year, MSPs havemade large strides into the outsourcing market and have even overtakenthe use of ASPs as the more commonly adopted outsourcing model withincompanies. Is this because the MSP business model is less obtrusivethan the ASP, since MSPs allow companies to outsource the maintenanceof their applications without outsourcing the applicationsthemselves?

Gartner's Jester doesn't think so. "What's driving [the MSP uptake] isa real shortage experienced by users in skills, particularly innetwork management. Most users - midsized and large ones - also can'tafford to have someone manage a network device or piece of software 24hours a day, so it's very logical to outsource that. The viability ofservices from MSPs to help people with that has been much in demand,"he says.