This is a combinationof human factors and technological factors and it's a big reason the ASP market is growing faster in smaller organizations that can't afford to buy their own copies of applications than in large ones that can. The original draft of this article had a few paragraphs on HotOffice, an excellent ASP for office productivity. Probably more than other factors, this issue has contributed to the slow adoption of the ASP model in business. Another 18 percent will be merged out of existence in 4 years. Perhaps as few as 5 percent of the ASPs now functioningwill be functioning in 2004 as they are now.
Nothing ever works out in real life quite the way it was supposed to.
The ASP model can work within certain parameters right now, as I have learned, and it can supply important management software that would be otherwise unavailable. There never have been simple answers to complex managerial questions. There are, however, always better tools and an ASP, used judiciously, can be one of them. A Web-hosting service for libraries. Fred R. Reenstjerna is catalog librarian for the Douglas County Library System in Roseburg, Oregon.