The Bloor Perspective: Life after ASP, diversified Oracle and looking for location-based services

Those organisations that have bitten the bullet and gone for ASP solutions are just about at the point in their contracts where they need to consider how they take the whole thing forward. So far, reactions seem to be mixed. Some are getting good quality services that meet their needs, others find that the choice of applications and the constraints of the ASP model are not as good as they would like.

Getting away from ASP, however, is not at all easy. The problem that exists is that moving away from ASP and bringing IT back in-house places the burden of specifying resources, installing software, managing the migration of data and then looking after the systems back on your own organisation - exactly the things you didn't want and the reasons why the ASP thing looked such a good proposition in the first place.

On top of this, no matter how well you think you negotiated your exit clauses the service provider cannot be expected to be too helpful when it comes to migrating applications and data away from its services.

So you are an ASP customer and you want to give up the service. Your first plan of attack is to bring the systems back into your own organisation. This would normally be the case where the business had its own IT systems prior to the ASP agreement. The first thing you find is that you have much more data than you ever had when the system was in-house. What's more, you find that the licences for the hosted applications you have been using cost a fortune. Migrating the data to alternative products rapidly becomes a complete nightmare.

Basically, the pain of moving the applications is too much and the costs of the hardware, software and lifetime management and maintenance are really brought home to you. In the end, the best solution is to find another ASP that will, hopefully, provide a better service than the last one. Interestingly, ASPs co-operate amongst themselves reasonably well so a lot of the pain goes away very quickly.

*Oracle spreads its wings - and stalls*

With dwindling sales in its core database business Oracle, like many other software vendors, has looked elsewhere to broaden its offering and line its pockets. CRM seemed like an obvious contender to prop up Oracle's fortunes.

Having clearly lost the opportunity to be first to market with a CRM solution its strategy had to offer a complete solution in the form of the Oracle ebusiness package. The promise made for the package solution was "winning the war on complexity". No need to be concerned about those troublesome integration issues, implement Oracle 11i ebusiness solution and all your worries are forgotten.

In an accompanying offer for the CRM solution, Oracle promises "CRM in 90 days" where failure to install the software in the stated time frame means Oracle will pay all associated consultancy fees. The only catch is that the offer doesn't allow for any customisation of the software. This type of work will attract high fee rates and many consultancy days.

Anyone with experience of software vendors will tell you that products are never released 100 per cent fault free. In fact, it is questionable whether or not any software ever delivers all of its promised functionality. While Oracle claims to be removing the complexity from the customers' systems it is moving that complexity into the inner working of the ebusiness package. Oracle has delivered a complex product that is unlikely to be fault free and then added promises it has to adjust based on reality.

Of course it would all be so much simpler if every organisation ran its business just like Oracle. There would be little need for customisation and fewer bugs would be found. Organisations would make massive cost savings. Oracle claims in yet another campaign that it saved $1bn by implementing its own systems. While this sounds impressive it does raise the question of just how inefficient Oracle's internal systems were before it took its own medicine.

*Knowing your customer (and where they are)*

As mobile carriers struggle to create revenue from their investment in 3G licences, localisation services - or the ability to pinpoint user location using a variety of triangulation and cell of origin techniques - has time and again been put forward as the prime technology of the silver lining.

The theory is the combination of various attributes will prove irresistible to marketers and salespeople alike. Think of the combination of a user account, service gateway, packet metering, and carrier-side software agents capable of sifting behavioural patterns and profiles and serving them up to commercial directories.

Marketing and sales has always been about knowing the customer. Traditional ad revenue from print tended to triangulate its value from the size and position of the physical advert, and the circulation and specialist nature of the publication it is in.

The holy grail still is the capability of being able to advertise a service or a product to a user at the actual moment they need it - through precision selling, followed by cross-selling. In this way, a keen carp fisherman stocking up for the new season can be alerted dynamically to the special offer on compost in that garden centre he passes on the way back home.

There are at least six mobile positioning technologies, all with varying strengths and weakness, each variously expensive to implement and each being backed by rival carriers. Inside the network, the data they produce might simply have to be converted into a standard co-ordinate to be interpreted, but outside the network, some of these technologies require modification to the handset. And that is just at the hardware infrastructure level.

'Where am I?' and 'where is what I need' are questions basic to human existence. It is going to take some time before digital technology is going to be able to answer them effectively.