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GO IT ALONE!

I can also customize the routing of the e-mails so that different individuals and companies receive leads based on the information provided by the customer. When the business was first established, this was one of the few functions that I retained in-house, because I could not locate a service that would be more cost effective—for the volume involved—than quickly sorting these leads on a daily basis. These advances allow me to tailor the multiple functions of the application in a way that is best for my business, yet other users of the same service can tailor these same functions in a completely different way for their businesses.

This kind of advance reflects the Rule of Decreasing Support Costs discussed earlier. It’s my guess that in 2002, it would have cost me a minimum of $50,000 in programming for even a rudimentary function that could query a database, provide real-time feedback to consumers within an easy-to-understand interface, and intelligently route the information provided to different people. This is precisely the service I described above, and in 2004, it’s available for less than $30.00 per month.

This aspect of ASP development—customizability for users—is in its infancy. The ASP industry has started to focus on customization as a key area of competition—with multiple reports in the trade press as companies work to outdo one another at customization. This means that we can anticipate a quantum jump in the degree to which individual firms of any size can customize basic services.

Case Study: Sophisticated E-mail Management Services

Here’s part of an e-mail distributed by JangoMail, the ASP discussed earlier. The company hosts customer e-mail lists and allows for easy management of targeted mailings. JangoMail informed me that it had added a new customization feature:

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