The emerging communications ecosystem creates a new value proposition for wholesale service companies, such as carriers and network providers, and resellers, including VARs and ISPs, to participate in the ASP market in several ways. Of course it will be a huge opportunity to provide new services, but let' s not forget that it will also exert a growing influence on network traffic. If telcos and ISPs are to retain that network traffic from ASP users, they must either move up the value chain and offer services themselves, or partner with ASPs. However, many are still struggling with the question of who to partner with. Broadband and wireless solutions wholesaled by carriers and network service providers may make some of these decisions easier and narrow the options considerably.
Carriers do all the heavy lifting, and the ISPs go out and sell it to their thousands of end-users.
As application hosting becomes the norm, companies will benefit through cost savings, competitiveness, and access to the best applications for a particular need at a particular moment. Passing those benefits on to the customer, resellers can further penetrate existing customer bases with whom they've built a trust level. Trusting the source of the new application will be essential, especially where companies consider outsourcing enterprise-wide applications. However, where resellers have built a particular vertical channel, it becomes easier to institute a market-specific application that may address one or more of an industry's simple concerns. Resellers also possess a certain amount of expertise in the vertical channel, as well as the bandwidth already in place to deliver the applications.