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Follow UsMost Indian IS managers who finally got around to figuring out ‘ERP’ in 1999 didn’t quite rush to implement it. The scale, complexity and cost were scary.
Yet by 2001, thousands of smaller businesses will use such ‘big’ apps.
The example was set by a simpler but critical Net-age enterprise app: email.
Most companies don’t bother to set up email, yet use it heavily. From IT industry giants to print media. Sure, they have their own Net domains like ‘economictimes.com’, but what they really use is Hotmail. It works fine, is cheap, needs no special software, lets you travel, and someone else runs it.
Hotmail is an ‘ASP’, an application service provider. An ASP gives you ‘apps on tap’, or software for rent, just as an ISP gives connectivity. Often, all you need is a browser. Webmail made email accessible to a million Indian users without access to big setups or even individual ISP accounts.
An ASP stores and manages complex software in a data center, renting it to companies who use it over the Internet rather than host it on their own LANs and intranets. A Rs 10 lakh price-tag on the smallest ERP setup would put off most SMEs, but for under Rs 10,000 a month they can ‘rent’ ERP on the Web
(www.makess.com).
IDC says the global ASP market will grow from about $150 million last year to over $5 billion in 2001, and $20 to 25 billion by 2003. A third of US ISPs offer application hosting, and two-thirds plan to offer software rental services by this summer. HP, Compaq, Sun, Cisco, Lucent and Nortel are busy teaming up with CA, Oracle, et al., to offer ASP services. There’s even a 200-member consortium
(www.aspindustry.org).
ASPs will radically change business IT usage. They offer an alternative to making and running complex IT systems, and let you focus on your core business instead. Gartner Group says that a fifth of new apps in 2001 will be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis. As an industry person puts it, “Outsource, and imagine the capital you will free up for your real business.”
For big enterprises, the net model is just as relevant. If you have a complex CRM package, you’d need expensive setups at regions too: Notes or Exchange servers, NT servers, clients, and support and management. Instead–just put your system online, and let your sales execs at the regions access it through Web browsers.
No wonder the Net model for apps is so exciting. It’s the way we’ll use software in enterprises, beyond 2000.