Business-to-business eCommerce of information systems: Two cases of application service providers-to-small or medium-sized enterprises eRental

Enterprises today can eRent Information Systems (IS), through the Internet, from Application Service Providers (ASP). This emerging IS eRental concept is a special case of business-to-business e-commerce, where the product is an IS application and the business units engaged in commerce are an enterprise and an ASP. For small or medium-sized enterprises (SME), IS eRental might be an appealing solution to complex and costly IT acquisition and implementation. This paper briefly describes Net-POS and Silverbyte, two Israeli software vendors for the hospitality industry whose members, mostly SMEs, confront with great difficulty the high cost of owning, maintaining, and managing the state-of-the-art IS infrastructure required in the Internet era. These vendors have recently entered the ASP arena by adding an IS eRental option to their for-sale offerings. The case studies are followed by a discussion of the new ASP concept as well as of possible directions for research on ASP-to-SME eRental.