I attended the ASPCON convention in
Orlando in May2000 to get an understanding of the ASP industry.
Basically, ASPs are the year 2000 version of the mainframe. Instead of running software on your PC, you connect over the internet to a server and run the software remotely from the server. Of course there are pros and cons to doing this. Convention attendees tend to be supporters so you will not hear much about the cons at ASPCON. However, I did see a scathing review of ASPs on ZDnet. After attending ASPCON, I found that ASPs don't relate to IN at all. You can see from the above that ASPs are a high-speed data application whereas IN is a narrowband voice application. In fact, I was going to bring up IN in a session where one of the biggest IN service providers spoke: Sprint. Fortunately, I was spared the embarrassment when someone else asked the question first. The speaker tried to be polite but it was obvious from the look on his face that he felt that IN was a completely different topic and the question came out of left field. I plan on attending the ASP convention in Chicago. However, the flyer shows many of the same speakers as Orlando and I suspect that they will have the same views.
What about Telephony ASPs (TASPs)? This was not even mentioned at ASPCON which may be quite telling. Within the world of telephony, ASPs seem to be a very small part of it and TASPs appear to be an infinitesimal part of ASPs. I did some independent digging into TASPs. I didn't find much. But what I did find talked of outsourcing telephony services away from CPE. This is the same Centrex vs. PBX issue the industry has always had. The other part of the issue is whether the telco owns the SN/SCP or if a 3rd party owns it (ASP/CLEC). Again, something that the industry have always dealt with.
In summary...
+ IN doesn't deal with true "e-commerce", the high-speed internet data stuff that ASPCON deals with.
+ IN already deals with the issues of Telephony ASPs.
