By William Fellows
ASP application service provider Qwest Cyber.Solutions LLC says it has booked $100m revenue from 13 customers since it set up in June, with a further $300m to $400m backlog orders. The company is owned 51% by Qwest Communications Inc and 49% by KPMG and has some 450 employees, most from KPMG’s June acquisition of SAP specialist Softline Systems.
The company is already offering SAP, Oracle, Siebel, i2 and Pivotal applications aimed at the mid-market expects to bring other solutions such as JD Edwards on board. It is currently working through a plan for the application portfolio it wants to have in place in six months’ time. It expects many of the ERP vendors to start slicing and dicing their software specifically for the ASP market, pricing individual application modules.
Qwest SVP sales and marketing William Tomassini told ComputerWire that where once companies may have used the implementation of ERP, workflow and other applications to gain competitive advantage, that business processes are no longer the differentiator, rather they are strictly utility. Tomassini says that where currently some 40% of a typical ASP implementation is custom work, he expects that to fall to 10% quite rapidly. ASPs are effectively offering templated business processes, he argues. Qwest also says that its business is evolving so rapidly that it hasn’t had much time to focus on international operations and is approaching deals on an opportunistic basis.
