Since the end of 1980s we have been learning to think of a computer as of a magic box standing on the desk and knowing so many useful things how many programs are installed in it. We accepted the fact that in some cases the ability to ”know the program” is delegated to some other computer down there and my PC is connected to it through the local area network. As end users, we were grateful for the newly acquired autonomy and willingly learned to install programs form floppy disks and CD ROMs.

In the mid-nineties thanks to Internet our magic boxes learned to communicate with the outside world and our user freedom grew substantially, as well as our understanding of what can be done with computer. Growing hardware output and increasing connection bandwidth has allowed our magic boxes to learn faster and more effectively. Majority of common application software is no longer to be purchased in stone warehouses and can be downloaded and installed directly from Internet.

That’s our current reality. Now, let us make one more step and ask the question:

Eventually, why the application software should be purchased and install locally? Couldn’t we just run it over Internet?

The answer to this question is called ASP.

Most definitions used by research companies and dictionaries are close to this:

”Application service provider is a 3-rd party service firm, which deploys, manages, and remotely hosts a software application through centrally located servers in a rental or lease agreement. (Cherry Tree & Co.)”

How does it work in practice? Standing in the center is the application service provider that owns or rents computing, storage, and bandwidth capacity in a data center and all the services that are necessary to secure smooth operations of the data center. The ASP installs both the infrastructure and application software. When the services get available, the ASP contacts prospective customer and closes the deal. Depending on the nature of the application, the service is started immediately or after some initial setup and the end-user training. ASP then secures routine maintenance and takes care of customer relations. The customer pays the ASP a monthly fee based on number of users accessing the application. This is a general and rather simplified view of an ASP service. But it is sufficient to point to several key points characterizing the ASP and its operations:

Among all the parties involved in the application providing (=data center, software vendors, network infrastructure providers, application consultants, etc.) the ASP is the party that integrates all the services and manages customer relations.

But do not get mistaken. No matter what we have just said, you can meet dozens of companies that do not fit the above definition and still use the ASP label. The ASP segment is in very early stage where constituting concepts are reconsidered every day and the market players have to bit through the great deal of hype. So in daily practice an ASP can be anything including an application outsourcing company, an infrastructure hosting provider or an Internet portal.

Today there are over 150 companies defining themselves as ASPs. Not surprisingly most of them operate in the USA, some can be found in Europe, and a few are active in Asia and Australia.

An average ASP today is a privately held company with about 15 months experience employing between 50 – 200 employees. However, the largest ASPs employ up to 1000 people, are traded on stock markets, employ up 1.000 people (USInternetworking and Interliant).

Portfolio of applications offered by today’s ASPs is pretty wide. It covers all types of software from collaboration, through office applications, to business information systems from manufacturing, through healthcare, government, to services, etc.

ASP is one of the rare cases where researchers, IT professionals, and journalists are unanimously positive about bright future of the market segment. They may not agree in how the market will be structured, which applications will stimulate customer demand, and how fast it will grow, but they are all in perfect harmony in that the ASP market has tremendous potential. Just this general belief is enough to make the ASP bonanza become reality.

Depending on the level of their optimism the research companies predict the ASP market to reach 6 to 20 billion USD in 2003.

The pace of growth of the data centers capacity supports this estimate. Next year total surface area of operating data centers all around the world should exceed 10 million square feet, or triple of 1999 capacity. It looks like ASP vision is really appealing.

Why that? What makes ASP so appealing?There is a great promise of simplicity, time efficiency, and cost savings.

• software service instead of ownership - pay for what you actually use, do not pay for something you may or may not use two years from now.
• software upgrading – the ASP takes care of improving functionality, you do not have to purchase boxes and install software on every single workstation in your company.
• central computing and storage facility – you as a customer are not using only the application in ASP model, but also part of computing and storage capacity, and network infrastructure. What you rent from your ASP you do not have to purchase.
• scalability – at some point adding one more user may become a troublesome task. Now your ASP takes care. Similarly with
• security management and
• reliability – to take care of these in conditions of complex network environment and distributed operations requires variety of top level professional skills. It costs money but first of all you have to find the people. And it is a real problem.
• IT staffing – delegate it to your ASP. Do not build your IT kingdom internally, let someone else care.

Simply ASP is the Promised Land. You as a client company benefit on every corner. You get immediate access to best technologies, serviced by the best professionals, your total cost of IT ownership decreases. Consequently, you have one less problem to take care of, so that you can concentrate on the core activities of your business.

We believe that the most suited to solve these tasks is the new category of component-based applications built upon open standards. Such applications allow for very high measure of code reuse, increased development speed, and an efficient maintenance throughout the whole life cycle of the application. Moreover, unlike the previous black-box application solutions they naturally open door to involvement of third parties’ and their products.

We are persuaded that the key role in this movement will play the set of industrial standards collected under a common roof of J2EE.

Java is a development language widely known for its abilities to create applications running on any operating system without porting. Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is a specification developed by Sun Microsystems that makes Java ideal foundation for large open server side systems.

To reduce costs and fast-track enterprise application design and development, the J2EE platform provides

• component-based approach to the design, development, assembly, and deployment of enterprise applications.
• The J2EE platform gives you a multitiered distributed application model,
• the ability to reuse components,
• unified security model, and
• flexible transaction control.

Not only can you deliver innovative customer solutions to market faster than ever, but your platform-independent J2EE component-based solutions are not tied to the products and APIs of any one vendor.

The title of this presentation was advertised as ”When the vision becomes reality”. In theory, the benefits you see at this screen should be appropriate more than enough to fulfil the needs of the ASP providers. In the following couple of slides I will go through the inventory of the items which J2EE provides and try to look at it from the perspective of ASP developer.