Talk:Application service provider/Archives/2012

Revisionist History
Could be I'm way off track, but it seems like Wikipedia should handle historical trends and transitions relatively gracefully. Most people in the industry view ASP as a direct precursor to SaaS, not the same thing. I agree the term has fallen out of favor, but what isn't being captured here is: 1) ASP was used heavily and had some fairly specific definitions in it's heyday ('98-'02 or so) and 2) there are key differences between most of the early ASP models and SaaS.

In other words, lumping them together is like lumping a mainframe and a PC together and saying they are both computers. Hey, they both have CPUs, disk, and RAM, right? ASP != SaaS and we should be capturing the primary history time period where ASP was in heavy usage, which pre-dates SaaS. If you look at some of the articles from the time period (pre Salesforce.com) you can see ASP meaning primarily to take off-the-shelf software and deliver it in a hosted fashion:

http://accountingsoftwareworld.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=161 http://news.centurylink.com/index.php?s=43&item=1735 http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Application-service-providers-Evolving-to-meet-market-needs-9187.aspx

This is why the early ASP models largely failed and why Salesforce.com was successful. They took a completely different track, writing software from ground up with multi-tenancy in mind and were able to offer much better value and so we have SaaS, a descendent of ASPs, but different from ASPs. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Randybias (talk • contribs) 16:38, 13 April 2011 (UTC)