Tuesday, June 10, 2008

It's All in the Delivery

Vaclav Vincalek is puzzled. The founder of a startup software delivery provider called Boonbox recalls the days of ASP – application service providers – and how widely they were rejected by enterprises that scoffed at the notion of keeping their prized data and applications anywhere but behind locked and guarded doors. Now, just a few short years later, he can't believe that companies have the total trust to give up their data to outside organizations. Granted, security standards have come a long way -- or have they? Remember Hannaford, and how hackers stole credit card data from the supermarket chain's system that was certified PCI DSS compliant.
Boonbox is an offshoot of Pacific Coast Information Systems Ltd., (PCIS), an IT consultancy founded in 1995 to help businesses use the correct software to solve business problems. So Vincalek remembers the pushback to this method of delivery. "When e-mail was new and organizations wanted to install e-mail systems, we offered to host them, but they wanted the server in their server room. The mentality that e-mail would be moved out of the office was unheard of. " So the shift to more offsite hosting leaves Vincalek scratching his head, and taking shots at Google, where the application hosting platform is being built out, a la salesforce.com. "Google is the biggest threat to our privacy right now," Vincalek said. "They keep everything to themselves and don't tell you what they're doing with it."

-- David Rubinstein

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