In Dallas, there are fewer than a dozen pure-play ASPs with offices locally. In addition, the ASP industry is highly fragmented, which is to say every company tends to provide a hybrid of services that are largely unique. According to Jeff Rutherford, vice president and chief operating officer of Ti3 Inc. of Plano, his company's expertise fills a niche providing equipment and software to companies that need to merge voice data transmitted over the telephone with data transmitted over the Internet. Ti3 runs the payroll technology for Swiss-owned Adecco, the largest staffing company in the world. By using Ti3's applications and technical professionals to manage them, Adecco has eliminated paper timesheets.
Employees use toll-free numbers or the Internet to report hours.
Rutherford said there were other companies like Ti3, but they didn't do the same thing. Ti3 charges Adecco according to how much its applications are used, billing the client per minute or timesheet submitted. Industry experts agree that, in the future, payment will likely reflect the degree to which an application is used. According to Simon Angove, senior director of product and management at a-Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable and Wireless, the most likely payment model will be rental. In basic terms, Compaq provides the hardware, Microsoft the software and Cable and Wireless the network.