35% of European medium-sized enterprises are likely to adopt an ASP solution within two years.
The Applications Services Provider (ASP) concept, whereby clients subscribe to access to software hosted by a central provider, is still poorly understood and not widely recognized. Yet a recent Datamonitor survey shows that over a third of European medium-sized enterprises would strongly consider adopting an ASP solution within the next two years. In particular over 10% of those interested in ASP would be willing to implement a solution within the next 12 months.
IT managers are looking to outsource applications in two categories: those that are too expensive to implement or too difficult to manage in-house (e.g. eCommerce applications), or those applications that are simple non mission-critical applications which do not provide any competitive advantage (Office tools, eProcurement solutions etc).
The results of this survey suggest that the ASP market is poised to take off within the next 12 months and burgeon over the next two years.This is good news for those firms which are looking to move into the ASP space. Nevertheless, before the opportunities can be fully realized some serious education and PR is required: only 78% of the IT managers questioned by Datamonitor had heard of the term ASP.
