Finding the Right Wireless ASP

In an immature market, it's best to worry about functionality, not labels

By: Mary Eisenhart

Every day you're grappling with the day-to-day issues and long-term strategy of your business. Maybe you've got your e-commerce programs running nicely at last, only to be inundated with a new round of pitches from hopeful wireless application service providers (ASPs) eager to sell you all the services your company needs to expand into the mobile world.

Who are these people? What do they do? Perhaps most importantly, how do you find the right one?

The definition of "wireless ASP" depends on who you talk to. "There's definitely no typical anything in this business," says Ian Collins, CTO of Wysdom, a company that's frequently called a wireless ASP but prefers "wireless software and infrastructure company."

Not long ago, Joe Jasin, founder and chairman of the Wireless Media Group for the Software Development Forum, hosted a 200-person event with a panel of CEOs from five companies calling themselves wireless ASPs. Sensing a certain lack of precision in the way the term wireless ASP was being used in the industry, Jasin began the discussion by handing panelists three-by-five cards and asking them to write their definition. After a suitable interval, four panelists turned in mutually exclusive definitions. The fifth refused to surrender his card.

With the emergence of mobile technology, says Rob Enderle, vice president and research leader at Giga Information Group, "you've got a whole realm of folks calling themselves ASPs. The ASP brand became trendy, so people felt they could apply it to most anything, and of course that's not the case."

• Application development: Design, write, and implement software to accomplish a particular task.
• System integration: Instead of writing original code, integrate components from different vendors to build a complete computer system.
• Consulting: Assess problem and suggest solutions.
• Application hosting: Run the software and maintain the necessary infrastructure to perform the designated function.

In the desktop world, the ASP model has allowed companies to outsource essential operations tangential to their core business - for example, customer support, employee benefits administration, or financial transactions processing. Essentially, the ASP is responsible for running the application and making sure it works with the business's existing technology infrastructure. The ASP meets with the client, devises a solution (from either custom-written or off-the-shelf components, or both), and, for a variable fee (perhaps setup plus monthly charges or a percentage of financial transactions), maintains the necessary expertise, connectivity, and infrastructure to keep the system running and up to date. This approach has the advantage of letting both parties focus on what they do best; it also offers the client a relatively affordable way to keep up with fast-changing technologies and standards, compared with acquiring the necessary staff and equipment in-house.

Jasin compares the state of mobile computing today to that of the Web when the Mosaic browser first emerged from academia. The technology is embryonic, the business models undefined, and just as the early days of the Web saw every two engineers with a fast net connection going into business as Internet service providers, their latter-day counterparts are adopting the "wireless ASP" label in droves, even as some more established companies abandon it. In some cases, traditional ASPs have migrated into the wireless space, or enterprise solutions providers have set up (or acquired) wireless divisions; in others, startups less than a year old are focusing on a narrow specialty and partnering with other specialists (any of whom may call themselves wireless ASPs) to provide services.

In a classic sign of an immature market, many fledgling companies are glibly promising all things to all people in hopes of finding a viable business model; in another classic sign, the word "partner" might mean "investor," "customer," "company whose products we use in our product," or "company that uses our product in its product."

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