Progress Software has initiated a program to enable its 2 000 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) worldwide to extend their 5 000 packaged applications to the application service provider (ASP) model. The program includes new technology, services and partnerships that will help ISVs quickly embrace the ASP business model.
Forrester Research is projecting that the market for application rentals, which stood at zero just a few months ago, will reach $6.4 billion by 2001.
Forrester and other analyst firms predict that many smaller, or resource-constrained, organisations will opt to rent software applications on a monthly basis from ASPs. These organisations will thereby realise the business benefits of previously inaccessible best-of-breed applications without making up-front investments in internal systems administration or IT staff. ISVs benefit from the ability to open their applications to an entirely new and potentially lucrative market.
"Progress Software anticipated the ASP model back when they first introduced the Universal Application Architecture in early 1998. Since then, they have focused on delivering application deployment and management technologies that help ISVs build and run distributed applications that can be deployed over the Internet and beyond the enterprise," says Richard Firth, chairman of South Africa`s largest Progress VAR, MIP Holdings.
"Many forward-looking application vendors are already realising that the market for Web-based application outsourcing will be huge and the smart ones are aligning themselves with companies that can provide the technology to create these rental applications," said Claire Gillan, a VP with International Data Corporation. "ISVs need powerful development tools to create these thin, highly-customisable applications and they need flexible application servers to deploy them over the Internet."
To help move the ASP industry forward, Progress Software has teamed with other industry leaders in the newly formed ASP Industry Consortium, an advocacy group formed to promote the ASP industry by sponsoring research, fostering standards and articulating the measurable benefits of the evolving delivery model. Members of the ASP Industry Consortium include: AT&T, Cisco, Citrix, Compaq, Ernst & Young LLP, IBM, and Sun.
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