[Founders] FW: [BusinessTeam] Ask Jeeves - good article

Message-ID: <6B75EF096AE0BE428B8CEDEA89C5F632783DA5@exchange01.lab49.com> · Mon Feb 26 18:48:32 2001 UTC-05:00

Very good article. 

 http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=425892 

Ask Jeeves eyes large enterprises 

By Bob Trott 

A GROUP OF smaller companies that rely on ASPs (application service 
providers) to deliver their goods are making a move on the enterprise, and
a 
know-it-all butler is leading the way. 

Ask Jeeves, which earlier this month released the latest version of its 
customer data solution, Answers 5.0, plans to move beyond the pure-play
ASP 
model and into the world of packaged software. By July, the Emeryville, 
Calif.-based company plans to offer its product using both delivery
models. 

The move is designed to attract larger customers, who often have concerns 
about storing sensitive information off-site as it is in a hosted, ASP 
environment. 

"We are now moving to productize [Answers 5.0] so it can be implemented
and 
executed behind a firewall," said Sean Murphy, vice president of marketing

and products at Ask Jeeves. "Users will be able to get the CD, install it 
themselves, manage it, and maintain it." 

Murphy said Ask Jeeves was swayed toward packaged software after research 
indicated that about 70 percent of large corporations keep their customer 
data in-house, whereas only about 30 percent store the data in a hosted 
environment. These numbers were reversed on the low end of the customer 
spectrum, he said. 

"Enterprises do deliver these types of solutions in the same shape and
form, 
but in-house," said Greg Blatnik, a vice president at Zona Research in 
Redwood City, Calif. "That's a potential market for someone who has an 
enabling technology. Quite honestly, if your job is to host and rent out
an 
application, that in-house enterprise activity becomes competition." 

Many Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies are hesitant to outsource their

valuable data; security is a chief concern, and large organizations
already 
have IT departments that can cope with enterprise-class software. 

"There are pros and cons to outsourcing CRM [customer relationship 
management] applications," said Paul Rodwick, vice president of market 
development and strategy at CRM vendor E.piphany, in San Mateo, Calif. 
"Customer data is [in many cases] your most important asset, and you're 
concerned about putting that outside the firewall. Also, many ASPs don't 
have a very long track record." 

Ask Jeeves is not alone in branching out from the ASP-only model. San 
Francisco-based Ventaso, which offers Web-enabled marketing and
sales-force 
optimization technologies, plans to offer deployable versions of its
hosted 
solutions. 

Another San Francisco company, PRM (partner relationship management)
vendor 
Allegis, added onsite deployment to its repertoire in early 2001. Allegis
is 
targeting Global 2000 companies, said product marketing director Mike
Stone. 

"It's expected in the market that companies offer software both ways,"
Stone 
said. "We made the decision to start out hosted, and that gave us a couple

of key advantages: it fit the nature of our application and it allowed us
to 
stick to our knitting in terms of developing the application. We've
focused 
on building collaborative software, not on how to deploy it, and we've
been 
developing software while hosting for a couple of years now." 