FRAMINGHAM (02/07/2000) - I confess I'm not much of an auto racing fan. But I saw enough of ABC's "Wide World of Sports" growing up to recognize Richard Petty's car when I see it - the big No. 43 smothered in corporate logos.
So my ears perked up when Cisco Systems Inc. executive Eugene Lee mentioned "Richard Petty syndrome" at a ComNet 2000 press conference organized by AT&T Corp.
AT&T called the event to announce its "Ecosystem" for the application service provider (ASP) business. Cisco was one of an amazing 17 partners assembled by AT&T for the project.
Several of the biggest players were on stage with AT&T data chief Kathleen Earley, and the panelists - including representatives from IBM Corp., EMC Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc. - were busy generalizing about how wonderful it was for them to be working together. So Lee sensibly took the microphone and tried to bring up a substantive point, "in an effort to avoid making this sound like Richard Petty syndrome."
It was one of those embarrassing moments in which somebody reveals what's going on in the guise of trying to deny it.
AT&T says it's not going to be an ASP selling application services directly to enterprises. Instead, it's going to create an environment - er, an Ecosystem - at an eventual 26 hosting centers where ASPs can pick and choose everything from server farms and storage to messaging and e-commerce applications, and then roll everything into high-performance user applications available for rent.
That's fine, but AT&T is historically lousy at partnerships. So it was natural for someone to ask how AT&T intended to choose among the various operating systems represented by the partners for its hosting centers.
No one wanted to talk about this. The EMC executive repeated his earlier speech congratulating Earley and AT&T for assembling this fine group. Earley herself mentioned, as an example of how companies compete and cooperate, IBM's move last fall to incorporate Linux into its offerings. That set the IBM executive off on a pointless jag about Linux, which has nothing to do with AT&T's ASP initiative.
Now look at the picture this creates. First the user decides to outsource applications. Then it picks an ASP, but it turns out the ASP is a shell that gets its services from AT&T. But it turns out that AT&T is just a transport and gets its hosting infrastructure and services from others. And then it's not even clear what platforms those services are running on.
Does that sound like one-stop shopping to you? One of the points of being a professional enterprise network manager is to manage vendor relationships. Why outsource if it just means your vendor has to manage its relationships?
There's an uneasy chain of responsibility developing in the ASP arena, making users wonder whether what's being offered is any better than what they do today. Richard Petty's stock car may have been slathered with sponsor names, but in the end the race was his responsibility. Can the new application providers say the same?
Rohde is a senior editor with Network World. He can be reached at drohde@nww.com.