In recent years, the ASP (Application Service Provider) model has opened up the world of marketing software to companies that might otherwise not have been able to afford it. In the ASP world, the end user does not pay a licence to install the required software on his desktop, but accesses the application over a secure internet connection, on a pay-as-you-use basis. For smaller companies ASP must seem like an ideal solution, promising to deliver all the benefits of a desktop solution, at a reduced cost.
Address management software embraced the ASP model later than database software, and is not universally provided by address management software suppliers. So what are the barriers to its widespread adoption? Tony Coad, chairman of database consultancy CCB, says ASP is not suitable for all clients. "It wouldn't be a good idea for, say, a company with a million customers on its database wanting to carry out a Postcode Address File (PAF) update to run it over the web as an ASP model," he says. "The costs are likely to be higher and it would take longer. However, for a company which has registration forms and wants good address quality, ASP-type address cleaning would be perfect."
Immediate updates
For many, the advantage of an ASP address management solution lies in the immediacy of the update process. David Green, business development director at GB Group, says: "Most of the market is served by CD Rom, and by the time you have sourced, formatted, compressed and loaded the data on to the customer's PC, it can be weeks or months old, and because of other business priorities, some clients might not load up the latest version." For Green, the benefit of the ASP model is the ability it offers to automate the process, so the client knows they are constantly referencing the most up-to-date data.
As clients look to reference more datasets, including the Electoral Roll and suppression files, shipping updates on CDs become less feasible, and even more so when clients are dealing with international addresses. International address management products, such as GB Accelerator International, cover many countries and updating them on CD Rom would simply not work.
Green is not alone in recognising the benefits of the ASP model for international address management.
"A firm capturing customer registrations to a website, where multinational addresses are involved, would require a huge amount of PAF data and local address format knowledge," says Allan McCouig, technical director at EHS Brann Discovery. "Where volumes are low, the ability to verify addresses at the point of capture, without the up-front investment in software and data to support the application, would be beneficial."
Capscan's ASP solution currently covers Europe and will soon be extended to the rest of the world. It is aimed at companies that need easy access to large datasets, especially international data. "In some countries, they will only pay for what they use," says Terry Hiles, Capscan's managing director. "They don't need to make any investment in the datasets, they just pay a monthly fee and then pay per use."
A typical entry-level solution for an SME can cost as little as £50 a month, which must put it within the reach of all but the smallest companies.
Speed and security
The ASP model is not without its constraints, and the one most commonly cited is speed. Can accessing a software solution over an internet connection be as fast as one sitting on your own desktop PC? "If you're running something in-house, under your own control, it will always be faster than running it over the web," says Hiles. "I am aware that broadband access is getting faster, and in theory, the two may one day co-incide, but I think that those who have their address management operation in-house will enjoy a speed benefit for some considerable time to come, and if you are a large organisation cleaning large files, time is of the essence."
Guy Mucklow, managing director of Postcode Anywhere, who describes his own company's ASP offering as a CSP (Component Service Application) solution, says speed of access to data is less of an issue than some people perceive it to be.
"There are two elements to consider," says Mucklow. "One is query response time, the other is network latency. We have control over query response . This is down to our proprietary technology that enables our customers to get at our data in as fast a time as possible. We have optimised query response time, so we can deliver a query in 20-40 milliseconds in response to a customer request.
"As for network latency, we are lucky that the UK has one of the best network infrastructures. What determines the speed of a network is how fast light can travel round it, and as the UK is pretty small, latency for UK customers is only about 100 milliseconds. If you're in Australia, it might be as much as half a second, but the bottom line is that in the worst case scenario, within one and a half seconds, you can access data from our servers from anywhere on the planet."
Another concern with ASP address management is data security. Here, much seems to depend on the type of data being shunted backwards and forwards across the internet. When capturing address data this is not such a big issue, because with the user likely to be passing out a postcode and getting back an address, there is no sensitive information involved.
"If you are cleaning the address, you will be passing a complete address, which is OK, but if you then add the name, it starts to get more sensitive," says Harry Meikle, group managing director of address management company QAS, which does not currently offer an ASP solution. "And if you're enhancing, again, doing this to the address level is OK, but if you are enhancing to the individual level, the information is more sensitive."
There are, of course, technologies, such as secure socket layers, that can in theory prevent unauthorised access to data. Postcode Anywhere's Mucklow claims that his clients are much more concerned about network availability and about what their usage is going to be, than about security.
PR disaster
As countless stories in the press have made clear, even secure networks can be breached and for some companies that prospect is simply too awful and commercially damaging to contemplate.
"Despite data encryption, certain information may be too valuable to expose in any way," says Hiles. "If it's a customer record, it may contain information other than the address data, and many organisations simply do not want to run the risk of presenting any opportunity to the hackers to have the encryption broken. If it is, they face a PR disaster."
It's not hard to imagine the types of companies unwilling to run this risk. "There are customers in the government and financial services sectors who will not leave their firewalls open and who are not comfortable processing data over an ASP model," says Green. "There will always be customers who favour the traditional data delivery methods."
For these customers, the alternative is to run the software on their desktop PCs, or use one of the products offered by QAS. The company has not ruled out offering an ASP solution, but has not yet done so, according to Meikle, because it has not seen the demand for it. Its alternative solution puts the application on a web server on one of the customer's PCs and then integrates that within one of its applications.
"It's similar to an ASP model, but there is no charging infrastructure built on top of it," says QAS group technical director Harjinder Burrha.
"The customer pays a one-off fee for the application, and then rolls that out to the users." For a bank, there might be as many as 10,000 users, located all over the world. The difference between this and an ASP solution, however, is that the application sits within the one organisation, on their wide area network, behind their firewalls, so the data never goes beyond their own network.
The consensus seems to be that ASP is an extremely effective delivery mechanism for address management.
It can make sense where data volumes are not too high and where the data being captured, cleansed or enhanced is not sensitive.
It's also an attractive option where the addresses in question cover multiple countries, and the cost of licensing individual country address reference files would be prohibitive.
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PROS AND CONS - ADDRESS MANAGEMENT DELIVERY MODELS
ASP model: Pros
ASP models are useful where breadth of service makes costs high for internal development and the user does not want to ship data off to a third party for validation before use, for example, international address management web registrations.
The 'pay-as-you-go' model allows for flexibility. As more services are required they can be bought, meaning you never have to pay for more than you need.
The model allows the user to build end-to-end processes, which can potentially inter-operate with several partner systems, without the need to transfer data manually to a third party.
ASP allows for the user to process one transaction at a time, rather than batch operations together, which can often lead to errors.
ASP model: cons
High volumes - millions of rows - might make the service less economic and too slow to be viable to users. The service must appeal to many users to make it commercially viable. This means bespoke functionality will have to be handled in-house, which might add to costs.
- In-house technical knowledge is needed to use the service
- In-house business knowledge is essential to act correctly on the output of the service
- The end user still holds the risk of using the address management service incorrectly.
Outsourcing: pros
If the outsourcer is chosen carefully, they will have the business and technical knowledge to manage address data.
The outsourcer can add value by applying their depth of knowledge to improving the service provided, for example in improving addresses based on the output from a PAF match.
The outsourcer shares risk with the client organisation in processing address data.
Outsourcing: cons
Data will usually be delivered as a batch file to the outsourcer - you cannot process one transaction at a time.
It is not possible to have a seamless end-to-end process when data is delivered to outsourcers, rather than inter-operating with a system.
Desktop (in-house): pros
Probably the quickest way of managing addresses.
Desktop (in-house): cons
The client will have to buy several licences for PAF data where international address data is being processed.
You will need to buy in technical/business skills to use the software.
Source: Allan McCouig, technical director at EHS Brann Discovery
PRODUCT FOCUS - NUMBERCHECK
Numbercheck, (www.numbercheck.co.uk) operated by Marketingfile, might be described as the archetypal ASP solution. It's aimed at businesses which need to check individual numbers against TPS (Telephone Preference Service) registrations. The system can be accessed over the web, but is also integrated into a number of contact management solutions, including Goldmine and Maximiser.
"Numbercheck is designed for a very specific role," says Marketingfile director Chris Loveys. "If you buy in a telephone number list, it comes ready cleansed and TPS suppressed, but if you see a phone number on a lorry, or anywhere else, that you think might be worth calling, how do you check that? This is what Numbercheck was set up to do."
It has more than 3,000 users at 1,300 companies and checks, on average, in excess of 60,000 telephone numbers each month. Each check is a single number check, which is charged at 1p. According to Loveys, 10 per cent of numbers checked have been found to be on the TPS.
POWER POINTS
- The main attraction of an APS model is the immediacy of the update process
- The model also makes it easier to manage international addresses
- It offers greater flexibility than previous systems as users only pay for what they use
- Concerns over data security and speed are just some of the barriers preventing widespread adoption.
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