ASP & SaaS

ASP = Application service provider, a terminology created by IT industry in the final decade of last century.
SaaS = Software as a service, a terminology created by IT industry in the first decade of this century.

ASP = SaaS, nobody would deny on this

So why create a new terminology for an old thing? We cannot deny people like new bottle, even the wine inside is the same.

Besides, I think there is at least one different thing. The architecture of the software products created for SaaS is different from that of traditional ones. Software products like Salesforce.com or SAP BBD are created to be offered as SaaS product. Such products are optimized in the architecture to support multiple customers to share the same pool of processing resource, storage resource and support enginners. To the hosting providers, such architecture can keep the cost to support thousands of customers at a controllable level, and the marginal cost to support additional customers is low. (Even BBD is designed for SaaS model from the beginning, SAP still claimed it encounters some technical trouble on BBD for mass rollout)

But for traditional software applications which are not designed for SaaS. There is no such advantage. The resource to support the first customer and that for the 100th customer will be almost the same. I think this is one major reason why ASP model failed in the past because the hosting providers needed to bear the initial investment on hardware and software licence. Once such providers lost the support on capital, they could not continue the ASP model.