Even so, an increasing number of companies, including Allied, British Airways, Sovereign Bancorp and engine manufacturer Briggs & Stratton, have made the ASP model work for them. British Air found ways to integrate a hosted customer self-service application with its customer database and was pleasantly surprised to learn that a small ASP could support its huge, international Web presence. Sovereign discovered a hosted SFA solution that was so easy to customize that the company could put the task of customizing the application in hands of the non-IT employees. And Briggs & Stratton found that letting an ASP host the customer self-service application on its website ultimately resulted in zero downtime for the site. For those enterprises, going with a hosted solution turned out to be easier and less costly than rolling out and maintaining an enterprise software package themselves.

"If you go with a client/server-based application, you have to deal with both the technical implementation and the cultural issues," says Allied’s Palmer. "With an ASP, all of the technology is sitting in their data centers. All you have to worry about is adoption."

Overcoming Your Fears

One of the biggest worries CIOs had about ASPs in their heyday was security. Would their hosted data be secure from competitors, hackers, the outside world?

Bill Patten, director of MIS and project administration for Sovereign Bancorp, a $342 million bank headquartered in Philadelphia, was particularly obsessed with the security issue. So while the idea of a hosted solution for sales-force automation appealed to him, Patten and his IT staff spent weeks researching the security measures their ASP candidate, Salesnet, had installed before signing on in the fall of 2001.

The staffers began by visiting Salesnet’s data centers in Boston. They evaluated the firewalls, encryption techniques, socket security features, intrusion detection systems and other protections the vendor had on its servers. They also asked to see the results of Salesnet’s own security audits. Eventually, they came back with a thumbs-up.

"It took a while for us to become convinced that the privacy of our customer information was never at risk," Patten says. The MIS director was also reassured by the fact that Salesnet, which was founded in 1997, had not only survived the dotcom collapse but was steadily expanding its network of profitable customers.

Patten’s next big concern was how easy (or hard) it would be to customize the Salesnet application. He knew he wouldn’t be able to change the underlying code, but he also knew he couldn’t do that very easily with packaged applications either.