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Wireless Application Service Providers - WASP
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(Content for W-ASP report was developed by Laura
Abbott, MobileInfo's Technology Editor) |
What is a Wireless Applications Service Provider?
ASP (Application Service Provider, and not Active Server Pages) market took
off in 2000. More and more businesses want to concentrate on their core business
processes and leave the application hosting to those organizations who have
scalable infrastructure and application expertise from technology
perspective. This makes even more sense with wireless and mobile computing
where technology is complex, expertise is scattered and scarce, and capital cost
of gearing up to deploy applications is large. Therefore, like its generalized
ASP model, the Wireless
Application Service Provider (W-ASP) promises to liberate enterprises from the burden
of implementing and maintaining a specialized IT staff and wireless application
systems. This new and
emerging service sector is attracting many established as well as startup
companies wanting a slice of a potentially explosive market. W-ASP companies
offer a broad range of services - wireless network connection services, wireless
application development, wireless horizontal application hosting, wireless
vertical industry application hosting, and converting web applications into
wireless-enabled applications. These companies specialize in a variety of
industries - from Internet banking to dispatch services to mobile
commerce.
With a multitude of wireless vendors promising to speed up adoption of wireless
applications, how do you decide whether you should jump into this game. Almost
every organization wants to call itself a wireless ASP - as if it were a fashion
The wireless ASP
sector is still in its formative stages and as such there is no textbook or
comprehensive definition available. To avoid this confusion, MobileInfo has offers the following working
definition:
A Wireless ASP is an organization that offers at least two the
following functions:
- wireless connectivity services through a common wireless portal i.e.
customer organization does not have to deal with a wireless network service
provider (W-NSP)
- hosting and managing of an
organization’s wireless applications
- Application development and hosting
- Third-party wireless application hosting
Who is not a W-ASP?
In our definition, emphasis is on the application and not on the wireless
network. According to this definition, a wireless ISP is not a W-ASP
unless it offers some level of application management or hosting on servers that
are managed by that ISP. It is also not a W-ASP, unless it has
professional staff on its own payroll and not through a loose business
partnership arrangement.
For the enterprise considering extending access to corporate data via
wireless devices, we have prepared an overview of the following:
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