That's one of the biggest questions that companies in the market for ASP services face, especially when they consider giving large numbers of users access to business applications they'll be using throughout the day.
Vendors typically minimize such concerns.
But the technical researchers at Tolly Research's SecondOpinion service have been busy in their test labs trying to determine just how much impact ASP usage can have on a company's technology infrastructure. In its first round of testing, Tolly Research focused on Citrix Systems' ICA platform, which is widely used by ASPs to provision remote browser-based application access. The performance results differed significantly. But for some more graphically dynamic applications, on the other hand, the Win32 client performed best. Kevin Flood, Tolly Research's vice president of research, also cautions network managers not to automatically buy into the utilization assumptions that vendors present to them.