More and more companies are moving in this direction as the Internet gets better, but the idea of a company's entire data set sitting pretty on the 'Net still makes me a little queasy, especially as the hackers and crackers keep proving to us that they can get into anything. The bottom line rules, though, so I guess a lot of these execs would rather point to an ASP's marketing literature on security as a possible defense of a data break-in if the ASP were taking millions of dollars off the budget. As the article also points out, there were 760,000 unfilled Information Technology jobs in North America this winter, so a lot of companies probably couldn't do the work internally even if they wanted to. So in the final analysis, it makes sense in a lot of ways to get familiar with what ASPs do and to learn how to differentiate among them and the services they offer. Regardless of whose market predictions you believe, ASPs are going to become an increasingly large part of corporate IT infrastructure.
Data warehouses become portals, etc.
The second revolution is componentized software. Oddly, when we see the power of components for individualized software, the limitation of the browser model is even more obvious. Since app subparts can be plugged-in in a new kind of diversity. Especially if components provide user-based progamming. Say you have some data downloaded and an analytical tool.