E-commerce will become the leading application, representing 52 percent of ASP revenue by 2004, compared to 28 percent in 1999. Among large companies with between 500 and 100,000 employees, only four percent are currently using ASPs for E-commerce. But more than 70 percent of these large businesses that participated in the study indicated that they were very likely to utilize an ASP for E-commerce within the next four years.
Businesses also expect ASPs to supply a broad range of applications for their employees.
These include applications in the following categories - messaging, collaboration, office automation, data management and various types of business applications. But this segment is projected to reach 55 percent of ASP users by 2004. And more than 60 percent of these large businesses indicated that they use outsourcing as one of their methods for obtaining software. This increasing trend toward outsourcing among large companies was also evident in another Phillips Group research study earlier this year on the market demand for converged network services. In that study, large companies indicated a preference for using managed services at 81 percent of their sites that would be connected to next-generation converged networks.