In the space of about two years, application service providers went from industry darlings to financial wash-outs. But one ASP poster child, Jamcracker, has survived by not just delivering applications but by becoming an aggregator of other software-as-a-service players and creating an ecosystem for delivering applications to multiple markets.

Now the company is targeting service providers as the best means for delivering those applications globally. Earlier this year, Jamcracker announced an agreement with XO Communications to offer popular business software as a service to small- and medium-sized businesses, delivering applications such as collaboration, security and mobility.

“The carrier market is a very familiar market for us,” said K.B. “Chandra” Chandrasekhar, founder and CEO of Jamcracker. “Our services were made with that market in mind as a channel. It is the only one that can touch the customers every month through a billing relationship and daily through contact center relations. The customer relationships are what is important, and that is all about trust, high availability, scalability. I fundamentally believe that they will be the natural way that on-demand will be delivered globally.”

To tie together multiple functions, the company created the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN), an ecosystem of global partners for providing applications and software.

“Unlike other ecosystems built around applications, we have chosen to build on vendor-neutral, open-standard platforms,” Chandrasekhar said. That choice is critical for global deployments because applications vary from market to market. A service provider must be able to deliver an application in a format that fits local requirements, he said.

“We provide an application from a local vendor, a software-as-a-service provider — in India, let's say — that could be used by Jamcracker but also any multinational that does business in India,” Chandrasekhar said. “We can bundle those applications for an international package.”

Jamcracker provides these in a way that enables service providers to brand the offerings and integrate them into an existing service such as voice over IP, he added.

“Service providers are able to provide this through an integrated, user-specific-oriented portal that allows for them to put necessary applications and packages together and link it back to their core offering,” Chandrasekhar said.

The three most common categories of services offered are security, collaboration, and IT services such as remote backup and restore, he added. There also are on-demand applications that enable enterprises to pull together their most commonly used apps, such as expense management, financials and sales-force management.

By offering on-demand services through the JSDN, the company can enable service providers to more effectively reach smaller businesses with more sophisticated applications while still controlling distribution costs — a major goal of ASPs back in the late 1990s.

Jamcracker today does business with value-added reseller channels, with regional carriers, and with national and global carriers, he said. Soon to come will be outsourced IT services such as help desk offerings that carriers also can brand and sell.