Being green

I support recycling big time. My local paper recycler must add an additional truck twice a month just to remove the residual from the 35 periodicals and the three daily newspapers I receive. (The post office hates it when I go on vacation.)

I look upon my two chosen professions - industry analyst and marketing communications consultant - as having two parts: The first is filled with new ideas, products and services that represent disruptive changes/new markets, a starting point for gaining marketplace acceptance for their perceived value. The second is positioning or repositioning ideas, products and services that are evolutionary rather than revolutionary with a higher appreciated perceived value.

Indeed, because most things - especially those truly new - are more easily understood within the context of things familiar, corporate spin doctors constantly draw upon the old as a frame of reference. In other words, we are some of the biggest recyclers. The ecology of the marketplace mandates that we take care. Nobody is interested in seeing bad ideas reconstituted, put back on the shelf and passed off as genius. Freshness is the operative word.

Hence, it is with amusement that I have been tracking the "hottest" new information industry sector to emerge since portals and ISPs. For those who have not read beyond the feature articles on industry restructuring or have not attended a trade show recently, I am referring to applications service providers (ASPs). Just how fresh is this space?

Loosely defined, an ASP can host a variety of multiple media-enabled business and communications processes on its network - on a turnkey or a la carte basis. This functionality has previously been the sole province of enterprise IT shops.

ASPs represent the ultimate evolution of the Web-based, network-centric model. Services include unified messaging, information dissemination and retrieval, transaction processing and all possible permutations and combinations.

With the service-provider space morphing into a world populated by wholesalers of infrastructure and retailers of "sticky" services - and with plenty of participants looking to be both - ASPs are attempting to find fresh, differentiated value by focusing on outsourcing a few things and doing them better than anyone else.

Their business plans are predicated on the notion that there is room at the highest level of the value chain for off-loading many enterprise business processes so that enterprises are free to concentrate on what they do best.

They are also based on inevitable blurring of public and private networks, and that enterprises will not be able to stay technologically up-to-date or attract and maintain the scarce talent needed.

They have, in fact, defined modern fresh space. Expanding user command and control without sacrificing on price, performance or accountability - a wonderful value proposition.

Will ASPs be big? They don't get any bigger. For those looking for what comes after .com, here it is. An ASP is a .com company on steroids.

Why am I amused? Think about Centrex. Both Lucent and Nortel like to say that more than 5000 features have been developed for their respective Class 5 switches, each one an "application" by itself.

I not-so-lovingly remember my early on-line experiences with both mainframes and Tymnet. After debugging my punch cards, I'd sit at a teletype machine and send messages to others connected to the University of Texas mainframe. I could even send messages to other computers on the Tymnet network if I knew the address and if they were on-line. Although it was called shared space computing instead of collaboration, you could even have interactive near real-time sessions with somebody on a remote terminal. And, nobody did windows.

Funny thing is, the emergence of ASPs as the modern converged version of Centrex and computer time sharing is a good thing. Today's enterprises badly need service providers to provide them with bullet-proof infostructure so they can concentrate on their niche focus.

In other words, it doesn't necessarily matter that these are mostly recycled concepts, but it will matter if the concepts are applied in a way that ends up being no more significant than yesterday's news.