The burgeoning Canadian Applications Service Provider (ASP) market has a new player – an alliance between Telus and Hewlett-Packard Canada Ltd. (HP). The alliance will jointly provide e-business solutions tailored to customers’ corporate needs, all in an attempt to create new sales channels and drive new revenue streams at a lower cost.
Built on existing Telus and HP relationships with Redwood City, Calif.-based personalized e-business applications developer, BroadVision Inc., the alliance includes strategy development, software, technology solutions, application hosting, operations management, Internet access and on-line security solutions. And, as a result of pre-integration and pre-testing, all services can be up and running in as few as 100 days, according to HP Canada, e-Services program manager, Carol DoCouto. “It’s a very quick time-to-market for a solution that’s very scaleable, very robust and highly available,” she said.
Stressing the notion of a single point of contact for the end user where everything is taken care of by one company, DoCouto said, “HP has the benefit then…to say to Telus that we can be that single point of contact, provide to you those solutions and as an ASP they’re the single point of contact out to the end user customers.”
Telus’ assistant vice-president of e-Business Solutions, John Seliga, echoed DoCouto’s words: “We provide that single point of accountability or as one person said, ‘a single neck to wring.'”
Telus, a Certified BroadVision ASP, develops e-business solutions using BroadVision’s platform and hosts those solutions across its network of data centres, while HP provides Telus with more complete solutions, providing customers with more choice and flexibility without sacrificing time-to-market, said DoCouto.
In conjunction with BroadVision, Telus and HP are set to implement next-generation business technologies and services to meet evolving customer needs. HP will be able to offer more complete e-Business solutions delivered in a utility or pay-per-use model.
“Using BroadVision will enable Telus’ customers to personalize their business solutions and revolutionize their customer relationships,” said Sandra Vaughan, vice-president of marketing, BroadVision. The “announcement is a testament to the commitment of HP, Telus and BroadVision to offer innovative, end-to-end personalized e-business solutions.”
When considering any ASP model, enterprises must always concern themselves with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). “Because every customer has different requirements, we offer a base level SLA, which says no questions asked, we guarantee that our site – network, security, the application – is up and running 99.7 per cent of the time, guaranteed,” said Seliga. “Above and beyond that we engage on a case-by-case basis with every customer.”
According to Seliga, the alliance with HP would provide the added support of an organization, which is broader than Canada. “HP can make investments in e-Business solutions because they are such a large, multi-national, leading edge organization and we can leverage off those service development initiatives and technology solutions,” he said.
Analyst Lars Goransson, of Toronto, Ont.-based IDC Canada Ltd., said that on the surface the alliance is a good partnership. “HP as a hardware equipment vendor, data centre hosting partner, Telus from a reach perspective and networking provider, and BroadVision – that kind of horizontal application is a hot application area – so it’s good targeting from that perspective.”
Despite IDC Canada’s long-term forecast that the ASP market will reach US$7.5 billion worldwide by 2004, “In most cases it’s a very immature market in Canada,” said Goransson. “We think it has tremendous potential and it has the potential to redefine who owns the customer relationship as we move forward. It’s a matter of positioning yourself for a future where the traditional software/hardware channels may not be there, they might be funnelled through ASPs.
“It’s not going to change everything overnight, but if you are an application vendor it will certainly have an impact on how you recognize revenue, and how you sell your product,” Goransson concluded.
The solutions are available now and are available in a per-customer model and will probably include some up-front fee, according to DoCouto. For more information, visit Telus at
www.Telus.com
, HP at
www.hp.com
or BroadVision at
www.broadvision.com
.