Oracle to let users host own ASP servers
- Posted:
- 17:51 02 Jul 2001
The offering is designed to make application hosting more appealing to users who don't want important business data stored on systems they don't control, Oracle said.
"There are still a lot of companies that want to have their data sit on a server close to them," said Timothy Chou, president of the software vendor's Oracle.com hosting unit.
Like other application service providers (ASPs), Oracle previously required users to let it house and manage the full hardware/software combination for applications Oracle hosted. But the company is now offering certified configurations of its Oracle E-Business Suite applications through server vendors for use within corporate datacentres.
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Compaq is the first hardware vendor to make the off-site hosting configuration available, for use with its ProLiant DL580 servers.
Joshua Greenbaum, an analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said Oracle was pushing harder on the ASP front than application rivals such as SAP or PeopleSoft. Oracle wants to "get out of the business of selling and supporting multiple installations running on multiple [hardware] platforms," he said.
Oracle's plan is a sound one, Greenbaum said. But he added that the software vendor still has to "fight a lot of institutional inertia" on the part of users.
Oracle has boasted that it has 125 hosting customers worldwide, including insurance company Cigna and the Bank of Montreal. But in a recent survey by Aberdeen Group, members of the independent Oracle Applications Users Group indicated that they were sceptical about the ASP approach.
Topping the list of reasons was a concern that relying on a hosting firm would leave companies with no control of critical business processes.
For a firm that needed little customisation, the ASP system might make sense, said Raman Batra, an IS manager at Legerity, a manufacturer of communication chips. The company went live with Oracle's E-Business applications for human resources and financial reporting last year. "[Our] business needs are not as cookie cutter as an ASP-hosted solution," he said. "The cost of outsourcing would not make business sense if it could be done in-house."
