Telecom Tech Vendors Move into ASP
Space
By Charlotte Wolter
Posted: 02/2000
Interest in ASPs, top telecom equipment vendors Lucent Technologies Inc. (www.lucent.com) and Nortel Networks (www.nortelnetworks.com) have both made alliances to develop products directed at this incipient market. These vendors are looking to meet a perceived need for carrier-grade application hosting infrastructure.
Nortel announced a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) (www.hp.com), called the Managed Application Services Initiative, in which they will combine key technologies for end-to-end infrastructure, security, QoS, and integrated network and systems management, drawing on HP's experience in high-performance data-center infrastructure solutions for service providers.
The partners will begin with e-mail and messaging applications that have been made more rugged for ASP use. The first offering will be a version of Software.com Inc.'s (www.software.com) InterMail e-mail application, augmented for high availability and manageability with HP's Internet Messaging Suite. HP Consulting also will offer product development and upgrade solutions for the application. Nortel will follow by mid-2000 with the integration of its CallPilot unified messaging technology with Software.com's messaging server.
E-commerce applications will be provided in cooperation with Intershop Communications Inc. (www.intershop.com), creator of a widely used Internet storefront application. Nortel will work with Concur Technologies Inc. (www.concur.com) on its Concur eWorkplace business portal, to be distributed through service providers. It will give access to online applications such as procurement, travel arrangements and expense reports.
Lucent has partnered with Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com) to make new versions of its programmable softswitch product, scaled for ISPs and enterprises, available on a range of Sun servers. The two companies also will explore use of Lucent OptiStar technology to extend optical communications to Sun Enterprise and Netra servers. Optical-enabled servers will dramatically increase the amount of IP data the servers can handle and accelerate the flow of information from server farms to end users.
Application hosting and delivery requires heavy-duty redundant network infrastructure, said Deb Mielke, president, Treillage Network Strategies Inc. consulting firm, speaking Dec. 1-2, 2000, at the ASP Forum in San Francisco. Among the network features needed are:
- Redundant network links;
- A Tier with 1 network provider with numerous private peer-ing relationships;
- Measures to ensure end-to-end low-latency connectivity; and
- VPN support.
A data center may have more than one location but must offer a security-hardened facility with full AC power backup and disaster protection.
The costs for these services argue in favor of a rental model rather than building from scratch, Mielke says. This scenario could produce a boom for service providers and data center operators if application hosting continues to grow. ASPs need to secure solid SLAs from network providers. However, local loops, which are usually obtained from RBOCs, are often excluded from SLAs.
The business-busting challenge for the ASP may not be the infrastructure itself, Mielke says, but training staff to support it. "If I'm not a service provider, how much hardware and software can I train my people on?" she says. "So I'm going to buy a packaged solution because this is the only way my business works." The other support challenge is the applications themselves, which may be new to the subscribers and require extensive online technical support.
"I never saw a data center with 99 percent availability," says Adrian Ionel, president and CEO, eOnline Inc. (www.eonlineinc.com), whose company hosts service access point (SAP) applications online for more than 5,000 users. Ionel says that 100 percent availability is possible only with frozen applications. A dynamic, constantly changing application, such as SAP, will never hit that mark. "We can get to 99.95 percent with a lot of work, but it requires redundant networks and special features."
For extra redundancy and uptime, in New York for example, eOnline could have connections to both MCI WorldCom Inc. (www.wcom.com) and AT&T Corp. (www.att.com) to separate switches. The service could also fully mirror servers with a hot standby, "but, even then, if the database is compromised, it takes a long time to come back up," Ionel says.
Typical outages entail one to two hours of scheduled maintenance per month, although some users cannot tolerate even that level of downtime. If the application server for a program such as SAP goes down, it may require hours to come back online.
Some application service providers have attempted to solve the problem by sharing processing among clients to save costs, a practice of which Ionel disapproves. "As a high-value ASP, technology costs are one-quarter to one-third of all costs. Sharing processing across several customers is operationally more difficult, and if the server goes down, five customers are out, not just one." The issue is even more acute for ".com" companies, he says, whose business depends on availability as close to 100 percent as possible.
The new metadata language, extensible markup language (XML), will be an important force in delivery of hosted applications. XML, says Doug Ehrenreich, vice president, marketing, for network management software firm ObjectSwitch Corp. (www.objectswitch.com). XML provides a way of marking up the data on web pages that identifies what kind of data each entry is, such as a phone number or customer ID number (see "XML: Mighty Muscle for Next-Gen IN," click here). The data then can be used across many different applications because the data itself is clearly identified.
