Evaluating Application Service Providers

Discusses the application service provider (ASP) model, which is emerging as a new form of application outsourcing. At present, the ASP marketplace is largely vendor driven with huge numbers of vendors offering a variety of applications to the customer. These offerings may belong to software applications such as enterprise resource planning, collaborative and vertical industry. Even though there are many benefits attributed to this model suggests that, in order to reap these benefits, customers should evaluate the offerings of the ASPs. Addressing this purpose develops a taxonomy to identify the various ASP offerings and a framework to evaluate the ASP offerings on categories such as security, pricing, integration, service level agreement, and reliability, availability and scalability. Even though this framework is in an early stage of development it intends to present existing customers with performance criteria for evaluating ASP offerings. Concludes that further empirical research needs to be carried out to refine this framework and also to find the relevance of traditional outsourcing literature to this new form of outsourcing.