ASPs dragged down by reliability issues

Following a poll of 306 European IT directors and managers from France, Germany and the UK, Rhetorik claims that nearly seven out of ten people have concerns over security, and well over half worry about the reliability of ASP services.

Claire Cook, research manager at Rhetorik, said businesses need convincing that the ASP model is secure enough to implement and need to start showing it in action. "Companies need to stop promising a unique model and start demonstrating it as a model that works and need to work harder to demonstrate this," she said.

Another survey, published in June by user lobby group ASP Community, found that only 17 per cent of senior IT managers are likely to use application service providers (ASPs) before the end of 2000, again with many of those polled citing the technology's lack of reliability as the major stumbling block.

Mark Roberts, ASP strategy director at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, agreed that security is a major issue for ASPs. "It's no good just putting a firewall in place, security needs to be built into every layer of the architecture from the operating systems to the database to the applications. Every part of the system needs to be secure for the model to work," he said.

Roberts pointed out that education is required because the ASP model is vendor-driven rather than customer-driven. "It all started with industry hype, not from customer demand. Unless value and education are added it's no good. Customers want a bespoke offering."

The report, titled, 'The ASP Market: UK, France and Germany', was sponsored by Computacenter and BT. Rhetorik spoke to IT decision makers at companies with a turnover of more than £100m and/or over 250 employees.

The research comes hot on the heels of a poll of silicon.com viewers less than a month ago. The survey found that only 35 per cent of respondents are looking to adopt an ASP model while 54 per cent are content with their current outsourcing methods.