Towards the ASP E-Business Model: A Conceptual Framework for Mapping ASP Specific Value Propositions

Today's emerging market is broadly characterised by rapid technological advances. This has consequently created an imbalance between perceived market demand for services and available technology. In the past few years, a lot of money has been invested in development and deployment of a new phenomenon called Application Service Provision (ASPn), and there has been a lot of paranoia surrounding the same. Despite the promise and potential of improving the way organisations develop, operate and maintain information technology application, Application Service Providers (ASPs) have fared poorly in terms of attracting a large client base. There is a general perception of a mismatch between consumer requirements for ASP services and actual vendor offerings. The aim of this study would be to combine both academic research and industrial investigation to propose some guidelines for resolving the current gap further examining the evolution of the ASP business model. This paper draws from a two-year research study (ongoing) on the market, business, managerial and technical challenges facing global firms, focusing specifically on traditional information systems outsourcing models and frameworks and application outsourcing, involving ASPs and web services.(1) This will be achieved by investigating the current usage of the ASP market and the factors that affected the adoption and use of ASPs within horizontal and vertical business sectors. As mentioned earlier, there is an indication of a mismatch between customer expectations and vendor provisions in recent literature. Case studies would further help to understand if the vendors have taken into consideration the reasons for the models failure and evolved from their original state to be successful in the market and sustain the competitive advantage. To study the process of ASP businessmodel evolution, a study of constructs has been undertaken. (C) 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.