ASP to SAAS to Clouds -- Oh my!

But today, the cloud opportunities are so broad and wide-ranging that service providers must build a services ecosystem “team” and a much broader vision of the potential market to truly realize the opportunities at hand.

Consider BT, which has always had a strong applications bent. Earlier this year, it cut SaaS partnership deals with NetSuite and SugarCRM, targeting the small- and medium-sized business market. More recently, it inked another partnership deal with Genius.com, which delivers an e-mail marketing service that immediately was rebranded as BT Smart Marketing.

Moving even further up the value chain are so-called platform-as-a-service vendors, which provide online tools and development environments that let customers build and customize their own applications as a service. Salesforce.com's Force.com service is probably the best example of this approach, along with newer competitors such as Bungee, Coghead and LongJump. LongJump, for one, has partnered with service providers in some instances, including Singapore Telecom, to deliver its platform services to businesses.

“Every ASP application needs to have the ability to be customized; there isn't a single customer willing to take a completely canned product,” said Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, of his company's platform play. “If a service provider were to try to build what we can provide for them, it would take years. That's our story: They can operate a single platform and build very powerful apps that they can offer individually but also are designed to talk with one another.”

Heading into the cloud

So far, we've focused mostly on what look and feel like classic SaaS or ASP applications. But for many carriers — particularly large, global players — the siren call of “cloud computing” is proving difficult to resist.

Often used interchangeably with SaaS, cloud computing is perhaps better understood as computing-as-a-service, with cloud computing systems delivering not only Web sites or applications, but processing power, raw storage, database query capabilities and even application programming interfaces and development platforms as virtualized services via large, utility-style data centers. Cloud computing concepts took hold first in the Web sector, with Amazon and Google in particular delivering early proofs of concept.