Building for keeps
Outtask created its own applications, and kept money other ASPs were paying to third parties
What does Outtask do?
We started Outtask with a vision of outsourcing what I would call operation-critical applications. The focus is not on e-commerce-side applications, but rather back-office operational applications that make companies run. Our mission is very much as a software-as-a-service provider. We operate a suite of applications that are offered over the Internet for our customers, spanning ERP, sales-force automation, CRM, time and expense management, recruiting management, travel management, and finally what I just call general integration services between those applications and our customer’s datacenters.
Given the high failure rate of ASPs, what makes your approach different?
The fundamental difference between Outtask and traditional ASPs is they were typically operating somebody else’s software, which they paid through the nose to get. So they had five-year contracts where they were losing money. Because we own so much of the intellectual property that we host, the profit margin is ours. There is no third party that we have to cut in.
We have integrated in several best-of-breed applications like the [ones from] Siebel and Microsoft Great Plains. But the vision was always to offer a suite of applications that were ours. One of the things that Outtask has very much focused on is understanding the applications that we’re going to host and only hosting a fixed set of applications. In going through the qualifications of those applications, one of the key things is their ability to be hosted and managed in a cost-effective model. Almost all of the applications that we host come with fairly sophisticated system-integration tools. Most of these products all use XML, HTTP-based technology, so it becomes very easy for us to prebuild the integration. One of the things that people get caught up in, in my opinion, is trying to make the products work in ways that they’re not designed to. Then you get into a one-year engagement of customization, which at the end of it, you have a highly customized, unsupportable product unless you retain the consultants. We have our own staff of consultants who are able to configure applications but we’re not going to build a bizarre one off configuration of a CRM application.
So to make this work, you have built your own integration platform?
Absolutely. The hub of Outtask is all organically developed. Some third-party technologies assisted in data movement, data integration, data cleansing, etc., but the hub is all Outtask.
What’s your take on the impact of Web services?
I believe they’re a core technological tool for delivering software in the new millennium. Going back through history, we had object-oriented programming that allowed us to construct logic. Then we had component technology that allowed us to package technology, and to me, Web services simply provide the common communication infrastructure and messaging protocol over which we can ship information. As a software-as-a-service company where we operate the applications and our customers basically access them over the Web, it frees our customers up from having to worry about complexities of networking. As an architectural tool, I think it’s next in a 20-year evolution of software.
Why?
The nature of the Web services applications lend themselves to hardware and software load balancing where state is retained in the database so you have a stateless application tier so you can bring servers up and bring servers down. I think that’s just one of the inherent differences between a Web services model application and more conventional brokered or n-tiered applications where you have effectively a persistent connection to a single box.
How big an issue is security when people think about using an ASP?
This is the absolute No. 1 issue that anybody has. It’s a major issue with any software vendor today. It’s the issue we wake up with in the morning and go to sleep with at night. Everybody is nervous until they understand the policies and procedures and technologies that you have in place to ensure that their data is safe, backed up, and will not get disclosed on the public Internet or otherwise compromised. It’s certainly the fundamental question that any software-as-a-service vendor deals with, and the day ends and begins with security. It’s a continual process for us.
