NEW YORK-Last May, 25 technology companies established the ASP Industry Consortium, Wakefield, Mass., to accomplish a delicate but important mission. Bring some order to the burgeoning and somewhat chaotic application service provider sector, but avoid actual standards setting.
By definition, ASPs house, host and manage software and deliver it on a lease or sale basis to multiple entities, said Cameron Chell, consortium president and co-founder.
“We wanted to ensure that what happened in the [Internet Service Provider] market doesn’t happen here,” Chell said of the genesis for the ASP Industry Consortium.
“The barriers to entry (for ISP’s) were too low, so every Tom, Dick and Harry got into it and quality of service levels fell.”
Chell also is president of Chell.com, a Calgary, Alberta, high-technology incubator whose first progeny is See Me Run Corp. Launched in February, See Me Run serves as an engine that permits telecommunications carriers, ISPs and others to become application service providers.
“The whole principal of ASP is to provide content, and the carriers come up with standards for how to receive it,” Chell said.
“We want to set goals for how do we get this piece of content over this type of bandwidth to this type of device.”
The consortium, whose membership is fast approaching 400, is headed by board of directors comprised of well-known corporations: AT&T Corp., AristaSoft Corp., Boundless Technologies Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., CyLex Systems Inc., Ernst & Young LLP, Exodus Communications Inc., FutureLink Corp., Great Plains Software, GTE Corp., IBM Corp., Interpath Communications Inc., Jaws Technologies Inc., Marimba Inc., Onyx Software Corp., SaskTel, Sharp Electronics Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., The Taylor Group, TeleComputing, UUNET, Vero Inc. and Wyse Technology.
However, Chell said “anyone can join.” Annual membership fees range from $5,000 for companies that want access to the Consortium Web site and its research and networking opportunities, up to $15,000 for those who want to be more involved as executive level members.
Executive members, who also participate in the organization’s boards and committees, include 3Com Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp., Cable & Wireless plc, National Semiconductor, Nortel Networks, NTT America Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Sprint Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
“Things are changing very quickly, not only because of the convergence of voice and data and wireline and wireless but also by our need to receive information in devices without hard drives and Pentium processors,” Chell said.
“Today, there are hundreds of [application programming interface] standards. Given the basic philosophy of convergence, we have created a forum for everyone to come together to possibly have a translation API.”
By the end of the year, one of the Consortium’s four committees hopes to have identified more than 200 best practices, Chell said. Garth Pudwell, an Ernst & Young executive, is developing guidelines for best practices in maintaining security, a high priority item.
Other areas topping the best practices priority list include disaster recovery, back-up data storage and service-level management, said Paula Hunter, vice president of the Consortium and vice president of sales and marketing of See Me Run.
There also is a membership committee, “which looks at the value proposition the consortium is delivering” and helps organize events, Chell said. The next quarterly board meeting will be held in London, May 2. Additionally, conference calls and in-person meetings are regularly scheduled.
The research committee “is focused on the size of the market and new and developing technologies,” Chell said.
The education committee works on opportunities to inform business and end-user customers.
“It is not our objective to come up with a particular standard. Our output won’t be a specification. We can’t mandate because then you get into the whole liability situation similar to that of (the) Good Housekeeping (Seal of Approval),” Chell said.
“But by publishing best practices and (best) standards and by educating end-users about them, we hope to enable end-users to ask the (right) questions.”
