ASPs are entities to which a company can outsource the hosting of a set or the entire array of applications which its employees or authorised external agencies/individuals can access in real-time and share with each other. ASPs set up large datacentres often distributed across a large region to host applications and use various technologies to make the access as simple and fast for the end-users.

Mr R Ravishankar, CEO (International Operations & Technologies), iFlex Solution gave an example for the Indian scenario: A Maruti salesman dialing in to an ASP's server to access the inventory of his company and making an entry of the sale of a Baleno car. This entry is updated in real-time thus saving both inventory and communication costs for Maruti, as well as saving on investing in large servers in various cities.

Mr Ravishankar gave a rundown on what ASPs were, their development and growth across the world market. He cited an IDC report which said ASPs were growing at a phenomenal rate - 111 per cent - albeit in low volumes.

The drivers of ASPs' business would come from their clients need to focus on core business and reduce total cost of ownership, market enablers like maturity of the Internet and the evolution of the Internet browser as an accepted GUI.

He cautioned that the main inhibitors for growth of the Indian ASP market were low market visibility and the bandwidth crunch faced by service providers. Discounting the factor that manpower was cheap in India and that outsourcing might work out here, he went on to say that it was getting increasingly difficult to retain high-skilled manpower especially in the technology area. He predicted that the ASP model would work well here too like in developed markets.