ASP News Briefs - October 23, 2000

• A Natural for ISPs
• Another Natural?
• More questions about "ASP"
  

by Gerry Blackwell

A Natural for ISPs
McAfee.com earlier this month launched the McAfee.com Internet Privacy Service, a content filter and ad/cookie blocker designed to protect users and "their digital assets from the negative aspects of the Internet."

McAfee.com is the Web incarnation of one of the PC industry's dominant security and virus protection software vendors. It also has Web-based virus protection, personal firewall and wireless security offerings - which it is interested in marketing through ISPs.

The new ASP service filters Web and chat content, allowing parents to set up accounts for each child with different filtering sensitivities. It also lets users control how and when Web sites put cookies on their hard drives. And it blocks banner ads that clutter pages and eat memory.

An annual subscription will cost $29.95.

More recently, McAfee announced the first ISP partnership agreement for its its hosted MailScan application, designed to protect against e-mail-based viruses.

Under the agreement, McAfee will offer the MailScan service to subscribers of Universo Online Inc., a Brazillian ISP working in Latin America.

We reckon more ISP agreements will follow. The McAfee hosted applications are naturals for ISPs.

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Another natural?
Princeton NJ-based nex-i.com, an Internet, application, and network services provider, is partnering with San Diego-based SkyDesk, an ASP delivering storage and document-management services.

Under the agreement, nex-i.com will use SkyDesk's @Backup service designed to allow users to protect and access stored information. Online backups make a certain amount of sense. This could be a logical addition to the portfolio of any ISP offering hosted business applications.

Nex-i.com is not your usual ISP, however. It brings fiber into - and all through — commercial buildings and provides a range of LAN/WAN services to small and medium-size business customers.

SkyDesk, meanwhile, is actively recruiting ISPs for its @Backup service. It lets ISPs co-brand the @Backup product and bill their customers directly.

As the SkyDesk site points out, offering @Backup "will provide your customers with a secure data management solution and a compelling reason to stay with your company."

This also makes sense. After all, your customers aren't going to leave you in a big hurry if you're holding their data hostage. (Just kidding.)

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More questions about "ASP"
Hard on the heels of a sobering bulletin on the ASP market from International Data Corp., which we wrote about earlier this month, comes another cautionary report from Mercer Management Consulting.

The IDC report suggested information technology executives in medium-size and large companies don't even know what an ASP is yet, let alone intend to use one.

The Mercer report, "Application Service Providers: Where are the real profit zones?," merely cautions would-be ASPs that the gold rush mentality may be blinding them to the need to develop a strategy for entering this red hot market.

The authors analyse the possible roles and business strategies for various incumbent players — software vendors, communications companies (which presumably includes ISPs) and systems integrators.

It's worth noting that the study nowhere considers the case of ISPs specifically. But it does analyse the options and chances of success for each of the broader categories of "incumbents."

The report starts by suggesting the hype from market analysts and prognosticators may be a bit over the top.

On the other hand, it concludes, "We believe that network-centric computing is here to stay, and is changing the economics and operating assumptions of the software, communications and computing industries."

"The key question is who will reap sustained profits in this new environment?"

It's a question anyone contemplating the ASP opportunity, perhaps especially ISPs, ought to be asking.

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