It's easy to get lulled into a false sense of well-being listening to a pitch from an application service provider. "Come with us," purrs the salesperson. "No upfront installation costs. We'll do the integration, take care of training and support. Don't worry about your business processes -- we'll straighten that out."

It's a fine daydream, but you'd do better turning your winter reveries to images of the Caribbean. That's because if you buy into this sales talk without question, you could end up facing a mess like Intraware just went through. Midway through 1999, the online marketplace for software and IT services outsourced its Siebel salesforce automation (SFA) application to SiebelNet, a unit of Siebel Systems that hosts its product through USinternetworking.

Intraware had recently gone public and was growing quickly. The sales staff had never used an automated tool to track leads and customer data. Intraware executives figured going with an ASP would be an efficient way to put a powerful weapon like Siebel in their hands as quickly as possible.

But Intraware failed to take into account the following things that needed to be done before Siebel and USi could start up the SFA application:

• Intraware's IT team didn't stop to model the customer data that would populate the system.

• IT failed to ensure the sales team's business processes were sound prior to giving them the tool.

• The team also failed to make adequate training and change management provisions.

• The executive sponsorship for the project was unclear.

As a result of these pitfalls, the first implementation of the Siebel tool was a dismal failure.

"S. Fenn" "We trashed the whole thing and seriously thought about walking away at that point," says Shaun Fenn, director of sales information systems for Intraware, in Emeryville, Calif. Intraware management decided to press on a with a second Siebel implementation -- also hosted by USi -- which was successfully completed last November.

Many customers tend to think the ASP will handle everything needed to deploy the application. But that kind of thinking is a trap, warns David Caruso, senior analyst at AMR Research. "ASPs want you to think they'll take care of everything. Most of them grossly oversimplify the story to cut short the selling cycle," Caruso says.

The truth is that farming out an application to an ASP is a lot like any other software project. Especially in the implementation stage, there is no way to shortcut the amount of work you'll have. Now part of the select group that has been through a successful SFA implementation, Fenn shares the wisdom he acquired as part of the initial ASP failure:

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