pproach is that the email address uses your company's domain name rather than a domain name like hotmail.com. Another would be a fax provider. One like Efax provides a free fax service that delivers faxes to your email box. This is an example of a free ASP. The huge advantage of using these ASPs is the fact that you don't have to do anything to get started. The "traditional" ASP sells a large, expensive application to large enterprises, but also provides a pay-as-you-go model for smaller clients. A typical example might be ad serving software or auction software for a Web site. Like Engage, who offers ad management software for Web sites. The software can be purchased on a yearly license costing tens of thousands of dollars per year. In addition, the software requires an Oracle database for the software to use. If the Oracle database is already installed and running in-house, then that is no problem, but if not it is a significant hurdle. The alternative is to let Engage manage the software as an ASP and to pay Engage a CPM price for the service. Unless you are serving millions of ad impressions per month, the ASP model makes tremendous economic sense. Another would be DoubleClick, who is essentially an ASP that offers advertising software plus an advertising sales force. Nearly any piece of expensive software, including giant applications like SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle, now comes in an ASP version to allow these companies to reach smaller customers affordably. While ASPs are forecast to provide applications and services to small enterprises and individuals on a pay-per-use or yearly license basis, larger corporations are essentially providing their own ASP service in-house, moving applications off personal computers and putting them on a special kind of application server that is designed to handle the stripped-down kind of thin client workstation. This allows an enterprise to reassert the central control over application cost and us...
