Application Service Provider and Cloud Computing

Application Service Provider and Cloud Computing are sometimes made equal by the business owners either knowingly or unknowingly by the third parties. This is a dedicated article on Application Service Provider and points are provided to separate a typical Application Service Provider and a so called Cloud Computing based services.

Basics on Application Service Provider

An Application Service Provider or online application provider is a service which provides software and IT services to its customers through a network ( Internet in general). The biggest advantage of this model is to provide access to specific applications (such as a medical billing program) using a standard protocol as the protocol http . The concept of software as a service replaced the Application Service Provider since 2007 for business reasons.

Application Service Provider can be considered as an indirect descendant of the “service bureau” of the 1960s and 1970s, both had their primary purpose to allow the customers to perform the outsourcing of specific applications and thus enable them to focus their attention on their first jobs. The purpose of these offices was to associate the computer the tool concept, which was initially proposed by John McCarthy during a presentation at MIT in 1961.

Application Service Provider and Cloud Computing

Application Service Provider and Cloud Computing are actually not equal. Or in other words a Cloud Software as a Service provider might not be a Application Service Provider. The confusion was added by NIST’s abnormal classification. Practically that was not a technical classification rather a proposal of service model. That service model has been described here – Cloud Computing Service Models and Deployment.

To explain the features like scalability, sometimes the service providers uses the terminologies loosely or it happens, the SEO ‘experts’ or person who manages the Advertisements fails to perceive the difference. As management of services on Internet has not much direct degrees or recognition till date, it is normal to find an abnormal person in some arena. It can also happen, the company has the idea to distort the meaning to the end user for increasing revenue. Users or clients of an Application Service Provider must be aware of these points. There are difficult technical things like Scalability and Service continuity – they are not equally or can be calculated as derivative of another one.