Alsop’s contrarian view on ASPs: “There are a couple of ASP-style companies now doing good business. Their secret is that they don’t rent services that are core to corporate IT; they don’t try to get companies to trust the heart of their computing to someone else. Instead, they have shown IT managers that they can do a terrific job running discrete applications. In such cases companies may well prefer to rent rather than license software….The two providers that I’m thinking of are Webex and Salesforce.com.”
Our approach with the Thick Server is that of an “distributed ASP” — an ASP on the LAN instead of the Web. This way, we get past the connectivity issues so prevalent in emerging markets and the “I-want-my-data-in-my-office” desire.
We are starting by focusing on the core IT infrastructure with the Thin Client-Thick Server approach. But our target segment is one that hasn’t been exposed much to computing. The discrete (and integrated) business applications will come over time.
