Telenor Xpress 1 - 2001

ASPs:Putting the Focus on Core Competency

ASP is a business model that may prove the key to solving an increasingly common dilemma: how to focus a company's time, energy and resources on its core competencies, rather than on its IT infrastructure. Drawing on Telenor's long experience as a telecom provider, Telenor's ASP offering is poised to go international.

Today, few businesses can afford the time, money or staff required to keep pace with the level of technology refresh needed to stay ahead of the competition. Small- and medium-sized enterprises are struggling to gain access to affordable high-end enterprise IT, and larger players are grappling with an upgrade treadmill compounded by the current shortage of technical staff. So how can an IT manager satisfy customers' growing demands without overstretching in-house resources or incurring the costs of increased infrastructure?

Applications, service and provisioning
The answer may be veiled by a new acronym - ASP. An ASP (or Application Service Provider) deploys, hosts and manages access to software-based services and solutions to multiple customers from a central facility. Although this model is already commonplace in many areas of information technology, the combination of current market forces and the rapid development of IP technology is now making ASPs a compelling alternative to purchasing off-the-shelf software or developing in-house solutions.

Across the board benefits
After hearing Telenor's Tarje Holskil explain the benefits provided by this Telenor ASP offering, it became clear that the ASP market will play a major role in the telecom and IT industry in the years ahead.

"Economies of scale and the bundling of license fees mean lower prices per user and application, and predictable costs. New features and services are easier to roll out. Scarce IT resources can be deployed on core businesses whilst both training and implementation time are reduced." As Holskil reminds us, "In an industry where short depreciation on investment is the norm, cost control and risk reduction are major concerns."

Home market strength
While many of its competitors have entered the ASP market from an ISP environment, Telenor enters from a strong position as the leading Norwegian telco. An old hand at IT and telecom service provision and facility management, Telenor delivers solutions tested on a demanding home customer base which expects no less than around-the-clock delivery. And through its current strategy of pursuing partnerships, acquisitions and alliance opportunities, Telenor is busy consolidating its position as the leading Nordic ASP whilst broadening the scope of its international ASP offering.

A window of opportunities
To penetrate the international ASP market, Telenor is actively harnessing the marketing expertise and country office network of the Telenor International Centre (TIC), and combining it with the know-how and services of Telenor's pan-European communications service provider, Nextra. As Christian Erlandsen, TIC's senior VP for corporate international business development, puts it, "By building bridges between our business units and focusing on ASP as our core business, we are developing a 'window of opportunity' in a growing European market." Now established as one of Europe's largest ASP solution offerings, Telenor's Login product is already providing services to more than 6000 end-users, and that number looks set to grow.