Resellers urged to trust ASPs

Resellers should embrace application service providers instead of seeing them as competition, according to Cyrus Razzaghi, regional manager for Europe at software vendor Accpac.

Resellers should embrace application service providers (ASPs) instead of seeing them as competition, according to Cyrus Razzaghi, regional manager for Europe at software vendor Accpac.

The company has more than doubled the number of its resellers in the past year partly due to its increased use of ASPs, Razzaghi claimed. "Application service provision is a business model that needs the channel for implementation and roll-out," he said.

Alison Heath, channel development manager at ASP NetStore, agreed that hosting can create business for resellers. Her firm's strategy is to take an ASP model through the channel. "We believe that the ownership of the customers and their trust is with the resellers," she said.

But Razzaghi warned resellers to choose hosting partners carefully. "There are too many ASPs at the moment and the industry is going through rationalisation with a 'survival of the fittest' situation," he said.

Sean Fane, managing director of ebusiness vendor InterQuad, claimed that any reseller can host applications if it chooses the right partner, but pointed out that there is a lot more to service provision.

"Many ASPs are going under because they think it is all about merely web-enabling applications. But if this was true, Microsoft would be doing it. It's about having a specialist niche and a tight community of customers," he said.

Razzaghi explained that resellers are able to provide an ASP offering to their customers in two ways. "Eighty per cent of resellers will be referral-based, with the rest being either full hosting partners or a mixture of both," he said.

Reseller Deverill has chosen to partner NetStore on a referral basis. Tony Fisher, general sales manager, said: "We are a route to market for NetStore and, so far, we have had success. Customers are very pleased."

Fane claimed that it is not too late for resellers to get involved with application hosting. "It is only now that most people are beginning to use ASPs," he said.