[In the ASP model, the desktop OS is largely irrelevant. –
LT ed.]
“Last September, a short briefing at the annual conference of
thin-client software vendor Citrix introduced me to the emerging
concept of Internet-based application outsourcing. At the time, the
ASP acronym wasn’t even the dominant term for providers of this new
form of computing. What a contrast at the same Citrix iForum
conference a year later… The event was a coming-of-age for the
industry…”
“FutureLink, one of the industry’s early pioneers, is now in the
throes of overhauling its marketing image. It now says that it has
two types of ASP customers:
1.Those to whom it delivers applications from its own data
centers.
2.Those who operate their own data centers to deliver applications
to users.
All of its traditional customers from its background as a Citrix
systems integrator fall into the second category of ‘corporate
ASPs.’ This is not just a matter of clever semantics. FutureLink
actively encourages its existing customer base to start delivering
applications externally to customers and partners from those
corporate data centers, just like any other ASP.
This neat shift in thinking suddenly positions the ASP model
as a natural evolution of mainstream computing, the successor to
intranets and extranets. The only departure from previous
practice is that sometimes the central data center is hosted at a
third party rather than operated in-house.”