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Wireless Application Service Providers - WASP

(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:

 

 


Related Resources:

 

 
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