A Silicon.com article weighs up the pros and cons of hosted applications by reference to the CRM market. I am encouraged by its talk of "greater acceptance of applications hosting as companies warm to outsourcing" – if this is happening in the CRM arena, particularly among small or medium-sized businesses, then companies may also warm to outsourcing other activities such as construction collaboration or ‘extranets’ – especially as the architecture, engineering and construction sector is heavily dominated by SMEs.
Other barriers are also falling away, it seems:
- "Organisations are becoming fed up of managing the complexity of on-premise software"
- "…in the past companies were not always able to integrate hosted CRM applications with the rest of their infrastructure but the wider use of web standards such as XML makes it much easier".
- "The ubiquity of cheap broadband connections for business overcomes many of the service quality issues that affected the early ASPs."
- With hosted solutions "companies can be up and running immediately."
