According to Ben Pring, principal analyst for the application services worldwide program at Gartner Group's Dataquest, the growth of application outsourcing for enterprise-level business was as inevitable as early volatility leading into consolidation among ASPs. You can draw a parallel historically with the growth of the large data center outsourcing industry 10 years ago. Pring believes that the successful ASPs will be the ones delivering on a business services model. At this early phase of ASP development, you might not expect to find business intelligence applications offered as a service. If early adopters of the ASP are still wary of risks such as the loss of direct control over applications, fears about outsourcing business intelligence are even more pronounced.
Strategic information is the lifeblood of competition in the information age.
Focusing primarily on customer relationship management, Interelate formed in July 1999 with the plan to move clients' operational and customer data to offsite data marts and return strategic information via a Web interface. Wade Myers, chairman, CEO, and founder of Interelate, refutes the notion that outsourcing strategic analysis is inherently riskier than performing it in-house. While this method is still vulnerable to human-introduced security breaches, it's certainly no more so than when the data mart lives within the firewall. In any case, the human resources and security practices of Interelate are acceptable to the U.S. Department of Defense, one of its customers. This combination of resources can lead to getting better information faster.