Evolving the ASP business model: Web service provision in the Grid era

Both practitioners and academics in the information technology field are becoming increasingly familiar with the term application service provision (ASP). Predictions for growth in the ASP global market in 2003 are estimated to range from $5 billion (IDC) to $35 billion (Qwest) (Kluge, 2002). If the predicted growth is realised, ASPs will have a significant impact on IS (Information Systems) strategies and outsourcing practice, not only for large companies, but also for the under-exploited SME (small or medium enterprise) sector. This potential is attracting many companies that aspire to become ASPs, but as some early ASPs began to fail, many companies tried to distance themselves from this term (Campos, 2002). With the emergence of the Open Grid Service Architecture and Globus Toolkit as incubators for evolving an ASP business model to maintain profitability, this paper proposes a hypothetical Grid Service Provision model. ASPS´ evolution paths can be defined by service delivery and infrastructure axes. In the service delivery axis, the paper presents software application delivery moving from a pre-packaged one-to-many model to the interoperable Web service model. In the infrastructure axis, the paper demonstrates the evolving path from HTTP-IP based networking to OGSA grid computing. This paper proposes a new hypothetical model of software and service delivery that is accompanied by two case studies and comparisons.