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October 2004
Book Review: Service Providers: ASPs, ISPs, MSPs, and WSPs
Reviewed by Cameron Laird
Service Providers: ASPs, ISPs, MSPs, and WSPs [E-Book]
Mary Helen Gillespie
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., E-Book
ISBN: 0-471-26713-9
$34.99
UnixReview.com readers are generally the "front-line" experts who make things happen in a technical sense with computing and related information systems. The books and products we review here are generally aimed at them.
We make exceptions, though, and Service Providers: ASPs, ISPs, MSPs, and WSPs is one of several books "[f]ocused on the needs of the corporate IT and business manager" that deserve our attention. The initials in the current title, incidentally, stand for "Application", "Internet", "Management", and "Wireless Service Providers", respectively.
The phrase quoted above opens the charter of the Wiley Tech Briefs series. It means, "Read this on an airplane ride, and you'll be ready to make executive decisions afterward." That is the model for many business decisions; as SP itself coincidentally mentions, "A recent study of ASP purchasing decisions by Zona Research showed that middle managers or higher made 89 percent of all ASP purchase decisions; IT teams were responsible for only 6 percent." The questions for us, therefore, are:
- Does SP cover the topics its title promises?
- Is the book accurate?
- Does it help managers make correct business deals?
- Is it useful reading for those of us on the technical side to help understand the business perspective of service providers?
Valuable, easy read
The answer to all these questions is "Yes, mostly."
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