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Matt et al,
I think it’s fairly evident just from looking around that there’s a substantial, long-term role for hosted / outsourced services even in a standards-based world. What the standards do, however, is to commoditize those offerings so that individual businesses are simply making a decision as to whether it’s cheaper and easier to operate the required technology in-house, or to have a third party do it. The result – you get a mixed ecology, where some choose to outsource, and some don’t. What these service providers often then do (if they want to stay in business), is to get scale on offering the basic, commoditized piece at lower cost than others, and/or to add value on top of the (increasingly) standards-based piece. The economics that make outsourcing attractive are particularly compelling for SMEs.
As examples, even without thinking too hard, I’d cite: - email (SMTP/POP3 use of telco/ISP mailboxes) - online banking (OFX for connecting Quicken, Money, QuickBooks – use of banking service providers by mid-sized institutions) - hosted AS2 solutions for B2B
Regards, Roger
From: Matthew
MacKenzie [mailto:matt@mac-kenzie.net]
On Jul 13, 2004, at 2:12 PM, Roger Bass wrote:
<snip /> Hosted services can and do enable interoperability without requiring (unrealistically) that the world adopts a single standard, or alternatively, that SME client-side solutions take on the full burden of translation and conformance to individual trading partners formats, protocols, processes. However, hosted service are insufficient on their own - there's still the last mile integration problem, i.e. integrating with different SME legacy apps, who (as I know from Intuit), can generally be relied upon NOT to do anything leading edge, especially as regards standards.
If extend the evolution analogy, I'd say that hosted services are merely stopgaps until processes and software evolve to the point where they are no longer needed. A hosted service provides cheater's interoperability, while placing yet another middle man into the mix with his hand open looking to wet his beak on every transaction. Personally, in today's competitive environment I see the good ole invisible hand slapping the middle man out of the way. Strategically speaking, of course. In the near term, we need middle men to sort out our technical inadequacies.
___________________________ Matthew MacKenzie Senior Architect IDBU Server Solutions Adobe Systems Canada Inc. http://www.adobe.com/products/server/ mattm@adobe.com +1 (506) 871.5409 |