"People pay us to not use our computers" ... a crass quote from an ex-boss while we ran an Application Service Provider and it is a truth that made us a lot of money. Now don't get me wrong, there was no shenanigans going on, it is just that most people far overestimate the amount of work they accomplish, particularly as that work translates to computing activity, and this phenomenon is never more pronounced then when dealing with a document-centric business solution of the type that most Enterprise Content Management platforms provide.

It isn't that people using products like Livelink Enterprise Server aren't doing real work, nor that they are unproductive, rather it is that the productivity is focused on a different application that produces the content. ECM solutions rarely produce content, rather they typically deal with the content after it has been produced, and most often as the last few steps in a business process. The interaction and time commitment with the content creation application is typically orders of magnitude longer in both computing and wall-clock time than the interaction with what is often the archival piece.

It isn't always like that of course, but traditional ECM applications and platforms were built to deal with the content created by other applications; to solve a content problem and not create another. Even next generation Content Management applications like Drupal, that actually do create and manage virtually all the content within the system still use humans to generate most of that content and it is client-side applications (web browsers) that do the vast majority of the real computing work.

So, crass as it may be, there is a lot of truth buried within that quote and it is that truth that makes many ASP models profitable. It is similar thinking, in my mind, that has lead to the large and increased use of Virtualization technology ... that is, I completely understand the use of the technology from a hosting standpoint, and I understand the economics from an end-user standpoint and I think it is the case that most end-users do not come close to using even the somewhat meager resources offered in a Virtual Private Server. But for experts, a VPS is a very limiting and frustrating experience.

In our case, GATE Village wasn't even 1/2 completed before the best business-oriented VPS available at our ISP was simply unable to provide a decent experience. There was a constant fight for more resource, particularly RAM, and it seemed hard to keep the resources local ... providing inconsistent and unpredictable response times. While our business plan always called for running our own servers at the appropriate time, we were not expecting that time to appear during the early development time.

Our problem was two-fold: the virtualization technology didn't favour our high-use of resources (particularly RAM) and our need for large resources didn't fit the business model of online hosting providers. Thus, very early on we became our own hosting provider and I have little doubt but that we will be deploying VPS for our clients ourselves ... but GATE Village and most Trusted Neighbourhoods will most likely stay with dedicated physical resources.