This includes the cost of hardware, as well as the substantial additional costs to fund corporate IT support. Because of the relative lack of business applications availability for mid-sized and small business customers, these markets present the most promising opportunity for ASPs. These market segments represent a continuum of interests that ASPs can serve, differentiated by application type, service levels and degree of customization. Applications services provide an effective mechanism for the delivery of reliable, consistent computing on a best-practices basis. The Emerging ASP Business Model Application service companies are finding that they must deliver more than just cost savings to win customers.
Customers seek assurances of quality.
Given this driving need, it is not surprising that many ASPs have roots with integrators and operations professionals practiced at delivering just these types of guarantees. The appeal of best practices is becoming widely evident in the interest for the coordinated hosting of electronic commerce and enterprise resource management applications for example, hosting retail and manufacturing trading and inventory applications that would be costly to integrate at distributed sites. In a hosted context, applications like these require high assurances of security and reliability. Therefore, as more mid-sized and smaller enterprises turn to a service model, best practices are an expectation. Like large enterprises, ASP customers will not tolerate revenue losses or business disruption caused by downtime or security breaches.