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DOWNLOAD; NightFire, Portal go the ASP way - Company Business and Marketing

Two vendors in the operations support systems space will take the evolutionary leap this week to the application service provider market. NightFire Software is making what founder and chief strategist Venkates Swaminathan calls "the logical next step in our evolution" with the launch of two new hosted services. Portal Software also will launch an ASP billing initiative.

NightFire will host its eCustomerExpress and eSupplierExpress solutions with help from hosting services provider AboveNet. The solutions are hosted versions of NightFire's current platform.

"Our experience has been...that interconnection between [competitive and incumbent] carriers is an arduous process. It's an error-prone process," said Tom George, product line manager at NightFire.

The vendor's hosted services are designed to improve that process and take the change management burden off its customers. "The challenges of maintaining connectivity to an ILEC are considerable, and [customers] would very much like to offload that," Swaminathan said.

eSupplierExpress targets data competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), automating the interconnection and interaction with upstream incumbent carriers. It has automatic and uniform interfaces to all eight major incumbent LECS. eCustomerExpress is targeting DSL providers and resellers that can aggregate services from several DSL providers and publish them in a Web environment, George said.

It also allows bulk pre-qualification so customers can better target their marketing campaigns and build product catalogs for resellers and others.

"There is a great benefit for both NightFire and its customers," said Brandon Thompson, senior analyst for The Yankee Group. "This will help NightFire capture more of the market, and the carriers don't have to buy the entire infrastructure. They can pay for service as they grow."

The moves come as the ASP model gains acceptance. "Anybody who is in the software business and isn't thinking about offering a hosted service isn't moving in the right direction," Swaminathan said.

Portal Software will not be hosting its Infranet billing solution but plans to play a major role in providing ASPs with differentiated billing. "The market for ASPs is not going to be a simple one. It's not going to be a user going directly to an ASP," said Paul Hoff, senior manager of ASP product development at Portal.

Hoff cited the rise of two new breeds of ASPs that are opening markets for Portal's software: the next generation ASP offering applications designed specifically for the Web, and aggregators that act as a middleman for users who need access to various hosted applications. The aggregator adds another order of complexity to the ASP supply chain.

"In these different layers, where all these different companies are talking, an end user might go through two or more levels before they get to the application. There has to be money flowing back and forth," Hoff said.

To get a jump on the eventual competition in this niche, this week Portal will introduce Infranet for ASPs. The company's Internet-tweaked software will work with new partners Xevo, which adds metering and provisioning technology, and Ensim, which brings the systems management of ASP server farms.

The initiative already has borne fruit with Portal and its partners, providing service for Agiliti, Agillion, Corio, ebaseOne and Encanto Networks.

"Agiliti is an application service aggregator that really has complex needs. That Portal is supporting them is a real testament to the capabilities of its billing software," said Amy Levy, an industry analyst for Summit Strategies.