Customer Evaluation of Application Services Provisioning in Five Vertical Sectors

How value is created for customers and entrepreneurs from e-business is a topic of much concern in all circles whether academics, business, or social. With the evolution of the internet in all its aspects, numerous e-business firms existed and extremely succeeded.

This article represents a paper that reports a research study on the development and decline of the application service providers (ASP) industry at the same time. To explain more about the ASP it is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network. Software using an ASP model is also sometimes called On-demand software or software as a service. The most limited sense of this business is that of providing access to a particular and very specific application program such as medical “dental” billing for example.

The need for ASPs has evolved from the increasing costs of specialized software that have far exceeded the price range of small to medium sized businesses. As well, the growing complexities of software have led to huge costs in distributing the software to end-users. Through ASPs, the complexities and costs of such software can be cut down.

At first, it was not really easy and successful to convince the small and medium businesses of the value of adopting the ASP. Also, another accurate approach identifies the key performance areas and indicators for the ASP business model.

This article also represents the findings from 215 responses to a questionnaire survey on how potential and existing ASP customers evaluate the benefits and risks of adopting the ASP model. The findings suggest that if the ASP model is a success then vendors will need to carefully identify customer requirements and avoid the pitfalls that overwhelmed the first wave of the ASP model, which was largely based upon a technology push strategy.

Moreover, and towards the end of the last century, the interest in e-business models increased in a very obvious way to help firms understand, measure,...