With companies relying on Information Technology (IT) more and more for critical business processes, the visibility of the corporate IT function has increased dramatically. At the same time, IT has moved from "behind the scenes" to being a highly visible function, one charged with leading business growth by delivering new revenue and increased profitability. In addition, the desire to have IT positively impact business growth has resulted in a new IT requirement, one commonly being called agility - meaning the ability to quickly and easily respond to change. The need for agility is driven by a number of business situations, such as a desire to better empower users, a merger, a response to a competitive threat, or to take advantage of new opportunities by being first to deliver new products to market.

These increased pressures have led IT organizations to show a renewed interest in outsourcing tasks that are not mission-critical, or fall outside their core competencies. In the past, this usually meant hiring another party to build a solution, one that was eventually handed over to the client for day-today operation and maintenance. In other cases, solutions created by the company were handed over to another party who took over operations and maintenance. Driven by lower connectivity costs and scarce IT resources, companies have began to take the outsourcing model one step further, relying on other companies to deliver software functionality as services. The concept of accessing functionality provided by a third party, and running at another location forms the basis for the Application Service Provider (ASP) model. We may define ASPs as companies that:

1. develop and deliver a service shared by multiple clients;
2. provide these services for a subscription or usage-based fee; and
3. supply these services from a central location, over the Internet or a private network, as opposed to running on the client's premises.

1. predictable costs and low initial investments;
2. enabling corporate resources to focus on mission-critical goals; and
3. shortening the time-to-market and timeto-benefit for new IT solutions.