ASPs: The Critical Connection

Supposedly the next big thing, application service providers creep slowly toward the printed page and the systems that produce it.

by John Bryan

So the bosses send us out into the virtual hinterland, looking for a strange creature called an ASP. They (ASPs, not our bosses) have been known to frequent the haunts of geekdom, but the question is: Have ASPs made inroads into the newspaper biz?

For that matter, what exactly is an ASP?

ASP stands for not only the snake that did in Ms. Cleopatra well before the days of newspaper production, but also the technology trend of the moment, the application service provider.

That means a hardware and software setup whereby you only have to worry about the workstations. The ASP takes care of the computer system, the overly air-conditioned building in which it whirs, the geeks who maintain it, software updates, capital, taxes, electricity and user support. You supply only the tubes in your office, plus your willing but wary employees. And money. Piles of money. What, you thought this was some Junior Achievement project?

They Do the Dishes

Think of your local waffle establishment as an application service provider. They do the cooking, give you a place to eat, plus fine, attentive service. You could cook the same thing at home for less money, but then you get to wash the dishes and buy all the groceries. On the other hand, you don’t have to change out of your jammies or comb your hair.

The pixel-stained wretches toiling away at your newspaper’s Internet presence down the hall probably have more than a passing familiarity with the concept. A big chunk of most newspaper World Wide Web sites, from the server to the back-end software that dishes up classified ads, chat boards and similar features are, more often than not, hosted elsewhere. And more often than not, several companies throw their tools into the mix. In fact, Norfolk, Va.-based InfiNet cites the ability to "deploy, host and manage applications...from a central place" as one of the key selling points behind the ASP model, President Steve Fuschetti wrote in a letter defending the concept.

"What works for [newspapers’] Web sites increasingly will work for their core business," Fuschetti predicted.

Indeed, the concept is moving closer to the printed page. Consider Danish editorial-system supplier SaxoTech, which already hosts Times Publishing Co.’s GoErie.com and Publicus Web-publishing system from its Reston, Va., data center, with links back to the paper’s Agile editorial system in Erie, Pa. It now has grand plans for what it calls a "sixth-generation editorial system" that would require nothing in the newspaper plant but "thin clients," namely PCs running Web-browsing software. Noting the costs associated with maintaining an "army" of information-technology professionals, the company thinks this "brave new world... is just around the corner," SaxoTech’s Lars Gjedsig explains on the company’s Web site.

"Wonderful," a concerned newspaper executive might say while bolting from one incredibly boring meeting to another, "but why should I care?"

You should care, the folks at venerable Atex Publishing Solutions will tell you, because they’ve already gone to a lot of trouble installing one of these things at The Industry Standard, it’s doing very well, the concept is sound, and other industries are doing it.

Or words to that effect.

"We are going to offer our applications in a service environment. All the customer has to do is operate the program," says Linda L. Folmar, department manager at Atex and a backer of the Bedford, Mass., company’s ASP effort.

Atex’s ASP operation at The Industry Standard in San Francisco (and New York and Chicago and points in between) gives a good glimpse of how this whole ASP business can work.

In San Francisco, it’s an ad-booking system for 35 clients, not one of which has a byte of proprietary software on their machines. For their application and database needs, they rely (through Atex) on a bunch o’ boxes down the road in San Jose at XO Communications (formerly Concentric). The hookup is via a Citrix Metaframe System through T-1 data lines, so it’s not unbearably slow.

Citrix is good for this because it’s glove-fit for these kinds of applications. All the information sits back at the server in San Jose. The only things traveling between the PC and the server are keystrokes and screen images—no big, nasty packets of data, which is good for T-1 and client machines alike. The server down in San Jose, meantime, is working up a sweat.

Back to the real world: The Industry Standard rep sells an ad and calls up the Atex application just as if it were on the hard drive and enters the information. Atex shoots it all off to the financial system, adds it to the customer-history file, starts tracking the whole shebang, and eventually dumps a text file into the Standard’s pagination system, which builds the ad stacks.

The rep, however, could be on the road, in which case he or she hops on the Internet, connects to the same server using a Virtual Private Network, and runs the same software (it’s not on the laptop, remember). The whole thing may be a tad slower than in the office, but otherwise, geography ain’t no big deal.

And who takes care of this system? For a fee, Atex in essence rents you its software and, in turn, pays XO for the hardware, servers, power and geeks to run it. (In other words, XO is sort of an ASP for your ASP.) And Atex also provides—can’t you just feel the fee growing?—the support and installation team. Which you would think would come out of the home office in Bedford, Mass., but doesn’t, with teams based in Alabama, Indiana, Canada, Virginia and Illinois. Again, geography ain’t no big deal. (Okay, there’s also one from Bedford—so sue us.)

Déjà Vu All Over Again

This whole thing has an uncanny historical feel to it, doesn’t it? Sounds like what we used to call (pause here for dramatic effect)...a SERVICE BUREAU!

"That’s exactly what it is," admits George Knapp, another ASP backer and senior program manager at Atex. "Sometimes the good ideas remain good ideas, repackaged and renamed." Adds Folmar, "ASP has just a little more...I don’t know, more futuristic sound."

Buck Rogers though the moniker may be, this ASP thing sounds pretty good, and as trained, professional cynics, we’re not used to the notion of something good for the newspaper industry.

CoxNet: An ASP, Minus the Middleman

It all started with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, John Reetz says.

"We built a network for the games, and the Atlanta [Journal and Constitution] borrowed a lot of people. We got to know the other papers. We were all feeling good about the experience, and CoxNet grew out of that."

Five years later, that Olympian effort has grown into a conduit for sharing pages and sections, budget items, graphics, and ads.

CoxNet: An ASP, kind of, before ASPs were cool.

It helped, says Reetz, the network’s director, that all the papers were running the same editorial systems, made by Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah. That meant that all Cox properties were on the same page—literally.

"We’re able to do this because of our distributed database technology," explains Alyson Oldham, DTI’s director of marketing. "This allows a bigger newspaper to host some of the solutions for sister or partner newspapers over a wide-area network."

So it’s not strictly an ASP in the sense that there’s a thin client at the newspaper and a giant server at some third-party data warehouse. But functionally, it works the same.

"It’s all modular software," Oldham says, "and it’s centrally hosted, but it’s hosted by the newspapers." At the same time, however, "this distributed-database approach gives you the cost savings you’d get with an ASP and the advantage of managing things centrally," she adds.

A distributed network is "much easier to manage," Oldham says. "If you have new software, instead of going around to each database, you just load it into the server. And it’s amazingly fast."

Not all servers, Reetz says, are in Atlanta. Servers are sized at each paper for its own needs, and then linked by the wide-area network and accessed through a piece of the DTI software called "locations."

Okay, that’s how it works, but how well does it work?

Reetz can recite a litany of content invented in one corner of the 18-daily, 30-weekly Cox chain that has enriched newspapers across the country.

"In Grand Junction, Colo., they don’t have the staff to produce a books page, so they grab it off [CoxNet] and tweak it however they want to," he says. "We view ourselves as a service organization—we take pages from the papers, build them, repackage them, and make them available for anybody in the group to change any way they want to."

And the sharing extends to ads as well, with a virtual spec-ad library served up via CoxNet, which won a 2000 TechNews Best Practices Award (TechNews, January/February 2000, p. 10). "It’s a great asset because the spec ads are a good tool for the ad salespeople, but the smaller papers may have only one or two people to produce them," Reetz says.

Back in the newsroom, story budgets are shared in similar fashion. "If you’re a sports editor anywhere in Cox and you want a tennis story for next Tuesday, you’ll do a search and it will pull up all those budget lines. When the story’s ready, you’ll pull it over, and you can pull over a picture as well."

And while ASPs make some managers fret over reliability, CoxNet has even served as a backup system, providing wire-service access to papers experiencing temporary outages.

This all amounts to a WAN powered not just by servers and network gear, but by creativity and cooperation. And that transcends any arrangement of wires and boxes.

Perhaps we need some leavening here, a little seltzer of reality down the pants of the ASP mavens.

Luckily, we have just the man for the job.

Put the contract on the table and slowly back away, advises David M. Cole, a San Francisco-based industry seer and proprietor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing.

"There are a few little problems with ASPs," begins Cole’s well-rehearsed monologue.

"First, this ASP and you are probably not in the same building. You have to get from here to there, and that requires some kind of digital line. And more often than not, that line is provided by your friends at the phone company, who are renowned for their efficiency and attentiveness to customer needs," he adds, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

"So it can go down at any time—9 p.m. Friday when you’re trying to do the payroll, for instance. You get to patiently explain Monday morning that the reason nobody has checks is that the data line went down.

"Second, you lack a degree of control," Cole continues. "You decide you need to have a slightly different check printed out. All of a sudden, it’s like going to the phone company, asking them to change something.

"You have to beg and cajole to get them to change something, and the ASP won’t want to change it. They’ve got this payroll application, and they run it the same way for 10 customers and you, Customer 11, want it another way. So they’re going to foot-drag, and you lose control."

Then, Cole says, you have to consider the realities of a changing economy. "A wise sage pointed out to me that ASPs tend to be some of these dot-com startups. What’s been happening to dot-com startups? They’ve been failing, and when an ASP fails, what happens to your data, what happens to your service? What do you do when they go out of business? How do you get your stuff back?"

Now, there are some kinds of applications where ASPs would work, Cole admits, and payroll (ironically) is one of them. (For its part, the Industry Standard put in a financial-system ASP from PeopleSoft of Pleasanton, Calif., at the same time as the Atex installation, according to Folmar.)

"Many businesses use ASPs for payroll," Cole continues. "But I’d be less interested in having an ASP provide library services, or classified systems, or editorial, or circulation billing, or my ad billing—those sound like systems I want to have a degree of control over."

A Tough Sell?

Which may be why Atex has succeeded, thus far, in selling the ASP concept only for display-ad building, and, thus far, only to magazines.

"Our marketing research concluded that newspapers tend to be more protective of their information," observes Atex’s Knapp.

"They want to be able to feel it, touch it, know where it is at all times, even though that comes with a lot of overhead."

Knapp isn’t alone in sensing a less-than-toasty reception. Steve Roessler of Mactive Inc. is in the business of providing advertising systems to newspapers, and his Melbourne, Fla., company touts its three-tiered architecture that allows the server to be anywhere—kind of an ASP in a box.

Roessler’s got the band ready, his dancing shoes polished, but nobody wants to do the ASP waltz with him.

"We’re not actively going down this road, because we haven’t been pushed," Roessler says.

"We really have not had people knocking down our doors saying, ‘give us an ASP.’"

Besides, Roessler admits, "to truly be an ASP, you need a pure browser client." Mactive will be releasing such a tool this year, he says.

That’s not a problem for Digital Technology International, which more than a half-decade ago developed a distributed wide-area network that turned Cox Newspapers into, in effect, its own ASP (see sidebar, right). While the key difference between CoxNet and a textbook ASP would involve ripping out the servers and moving them to DTI’s Springville, Utah, headquarters, Marketing Director Alyson Oldham doesn’t expect many takers.

"We have had people ask us about our plans for ASP, and definitely with the technology, it’s easy to do that," she says. "But we’re usually working with newspapers in the middle and upper end of the market. I don’t see any willingness among those papers to give up their security."

But Knapp sees the door to the newsroom systems office open, at least a crack.

"There’s one thing that might change newspapers’ minds: For years, with proprietary systems, you had this bunch of people who were trained to take care of them. But now, those systems are phasing out, and news-papers are finding that when budgets get cut, training is the first thing to go.

"So some of their skill sets haven’t kept pace with client-server tech-nology," Knapp adds. "Newspapers are looking to replace these systems, and they’ve discovered that the proprietary-systems groups don’t have a good knowledge base to handle those things.

One bonus of having an ASP, Knapp argues, is that "knowledge is provided. We can manage databases remotely, and the things that have been done historically by newspapers can be done by the ASP provider."

"Down the road," Knapp surmises, "there could be a change, and that market may open up a little bit."

Adds Folmar, "The ASP model would certainly work for newspapers [with] several small sites in the outlying areas that aren’t big enough for their own systems. But the newspapers could put the servers in-house and use a central server."

"We’re hopeful that some newspapers will want to do that," he adds. "Nobody has yet, but we’re close."

Small-Market Solution?

Mactive’s Roessler agrees that when it comes to the ASP model, smaller may be better. "Where you get the ASP interest is at the smaller papers: ‘Hey, we’re tired of these smaller, inferior products, we want what the big guns have.’ With ASP, they can afford that."

Well, kind of.

The upfront savings from not needing to outfit and operate a computer room are undeniable, Roessler admits, "but there are things that don’t go away: implementation costs, support agreements, monthly fees. You’ll still do your own administration, still have to integrate the ASP into other systems.

"You still have to maintain your internal network, and if you don’t have a high-speed Internet connection, you’re going to have to provide that, too," he adds. "If you look at cost savings over time, you may not save as much as you’d think."

And, as Cole points out, there are the inevitable support problems

when you’re dealing with outside contractors, not employees. "Hopefully, with the proper infrastructure, [the ASP] will be calling you to tell you that you have problems, not the other way around," Roessler responds.

If not... well, did you save enough capital to make up for the missed ad revenue?

Despite these potential stumbling blocks, what really gets Roessler’s toes tapping is clustering—the concept of centralizing the production and marketing functions of multiple regional newspapers.

"Clustering is the buzzword we’re hearing right now," Roessler says. "What we see is that regional newspaper groups can host this clustering server—they can have all their publications on it, all their products on it, and that would allow for unbelievable advertising capabilities because of cross-selling."

Hmmm. Sounds like what we used to call (drum roll, please)....an ASP.

John Bryan is a member of the pagination project team at the Los Angeles Times. E-mail, John.Bryan@LATimes.com.

Sources:

David M. Cole, The Cole Group, Box 719, Pacifica, Calif. 94044. E-mail, dmc@colepapers.net; phone, (650) 557-9595; fax, (650) 557-9696.
Linda L. Folmar, Atex Media Solutions Inc., 15 Crosby Drive, Bedford, Mass. 01730. E-mail, lfolmar@atex.com; phone, (781) 276-1289; fax, (781) 276-1254.
George Knapp, Atex Media Solutions Inc., 15 Crosby Drive, Bedford, Mass. 01730. E-mail, gknapp@atex.com; phone, (781) 276-1283; fax, (781) 276-1254.
Alyson Oldham, Digital Technologies International, 1180 N. Mountain Springs Parkway, Springville, Utah 84663. E-mail, aoldham@dtint.com; phone, (801) 853-5000; fax, (801) 853-5001.
Steve Roessler, Mactive Inc., 410 N. Wickham Road, Suite 200, Melbourne, Fla. 32935. E-mail, stever@mactive.com; phone, (321) 254-5559; fax, (321) 254-5977.