ASPire Winners Show How It’s Done

The ASP Industry Consortium identified four shining examples of best practice from among its members yesterday (Nov 14th) as it announced the winners of the first of its ASPire awards. It also published new guidelines for security, service level agreements and contracts between providers and users (see separate story).

The organisation, which has grown from its launch in May last year to represent a membership of more than 700 ASPs and related vendors in 29 countries worldwide, established the ASPire awards to illustrate best practice rather than prescribing it, said Consortium president Paula Hunter.

“We didn’t want to set ourselves up as a standards body,” said Hunter. “We needed to educate the market on what the best standard of care is.”

To be considered for the awards, members had to submit case studies of deployments illustrating best practice in one of four categories — delivery, integration, management/operations and enablement.

The winners were selected from a shortlist of twenty finalists by an independent review board of industry luminaries, including IDC analyst Clare Gillan — author of the July 1998 report that first identified the enterprise ASP category — Summit Strategies’ Laurie McCabe, and Amy Wohl of Wohl Associates.

Longstanding educational market ASP LearningStation.com won the delivery category for its provision of services to a small, private school for 4-12 year-olds in South Carolina at a cost of around $12 monthly per student.

Business process integration ASP eTopware was the integration category winner. It used its proprietary application platform to build a dispute management system for a leading credit card transaction processor in Mexico.

Internet services management vendor Resonate Inc won the management and operations category for its development of a service management solution for North Carolina-based ASP Interpath.

Atlanta-based full service provider and ASP Verso Technologies was the winner of the enablement category. It provided a customer relationship management solution, based on technology from Octane Software, for a business-to-business marketplace serving the lawn and garden industry. Verso is the result of a recently-completed merger between IT services group Eltrax Inc and ASP startup Cereus Inc.

The Consortium has published the case studies submitted by the twenty finalists on its web site.