BOSTON (05/24/2000) - Year-old ASP Qwest Cyber.Solutions LLC yesterday refined its customer focus at the ASPCON show in Orlando with its QCS Enterprise Freedom Product Suite.
Instead of offering services to all enterprise business users, Qwest Cyber.Solutions, a joint venture between KPMG and Qwest Communications, will focus on the finance, communications, healthcare and services industry sectors.
While Qwest Cyber.Solutions does not plan on turning business away - in fact, one of its largest customers is General Motors - the application service provider believes it can better serve customers by concentrating on specific vertical industries.
Qwest Cyber.Solutions offers hosted software applications from Ariba, Captura, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel Systems.
KPMG has 14 industry segments that it has developed software customizations and templates for, says John Charters, president and CEO at Qwest Cyber.Solutions.
"We looked at all 14 and decided which of those best aligned with our business," Charters explains.
But as the company develops and aligns itself with additional software companies or even acquires vertical ASP partners, Qwest Cyber.Solutions will focus on additional industry segments in the future, Charters explains.
Qwest Cyber.Solutions Enterprise Freedom Product Suite is available in three flavors including Ultimate Freedom, Freedom for Hosted Applications and Freedom for Managed Applications, which essentially define where a customer's application will be hosted and who owns the application.
Ultimate Freedom means that all applications are hosted at Qwest Cyber.Solutions CyberCenters, which are the ASP's data centers. Customers rent theses applications from the ASP, which owns the software licenses.
Freedom for Hosted Applications means that all of the applications are hosted at Qwest Cyber.Solutions, but the customer can retain ownership of the software. This is ideal for customers that already have a deal with a software provider or they already own licenses for specific applications that they now want to outsource.
Freedom for Managed Applications is actually not a traditional ASP service, but allows customers to use Qwest Cyber.Solutions application management services.
The application and the servers that the application runs on are actually at the customer location instead of within Qwest Cyber.Solutions facilities.www.qwestcybersolutions.com.