Application Service Providers and SMEs: Further Research Needed

This paper reports from an pilot study about the application service provider (ASP) phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to raise some further research questions in the subject of ASP. In the paper some empirical findings are reported and compared with literature about ASP, IT outsourcing, inter-organizational relationship, and strategic network. The IT outsourcing literature focuses primarily on large organizations and with an underlying assumption that, IT outsourcing is when a large organization outsource an internal IT-department, IT-system or IT-function. An ongoing trend is the development of a new organization referred to as ASP. With ASP collaboration in IT outsourcing gets a new dimension. These “new” IT outsourcers play a significant part as intermediaries between sub-contractors and customer by supporting external clients with information and communication technologies (ICTs) and ICT services. The focus of the paper is, what role does ASPs play in collaboration. There is a discussion on how collaboration is done, or could be done through an ASP. Within this subject there are at least two areas that are interesting: ASP in itself and the effects of using an ASP. This paper gives short descriptions of 1) ASP and IT outsourcing, 2) interorganizational relationship, and 3) strategic networks. The ASP is described in terms of what it is, motives for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) joining an ASP, and which relationships there are between them. Following this, there is a description of a case organization, describing the difficulties that the organization experiences in the development and management of the relationships in an ASP situation. Finally, based on the literature review and the empirical findings some further research issues are proposed.