This would enable a company to differentiate its services early, offering more complex solutions through focusing its resources, and building a defensible position against future potential competition. Those that are successful in developing complex offerings should be able to forge profitable positions on the basis of strong service differentiation. Key vertical markets for an ASP operation to pursue within this area include travel, transport and logistics, manufacturing and distribution, financial services, specialist high-tech, entertainment, information and education, communications and health. Whichever approach they select, ISPs must consider their application service portfolio as an evolving entity. The ultimate objective should be that of developing the necessary organisational skills and knowledge of customer requirements, in order to continuously deepen their overall market penetration.
Partnerships are already a key part of the drive to build market share.
These are being established in response to the need to engage in risk sharing, to seed the market, to secure routes to market for the new services, to build trust with the end user, and, most importantly, to assemble new skill sets. Within the ASP market, offering complete solutions to customers will require skills that are naturally owned by a variety of players, and so a vital element of the race will be the swift assembly of the requisite competencies. The key to reaping the full benefit of the ASP model will be to retain control of the customer relationship and to avoid being demoted to the status of anonymous third-party wholesale network provider. In the long term, however, these assets alone will not be enough. ISPs will need to ensure that their networks are capable of providing the kind of reliability, availability, redundancy, security and uptimes companies will expect if they are to place their business applications in the hands of a third party.