When Sunburst Hospitality was spun off from Choice Hotels in late 1997, it wanted to keep using the PeopleSoft financial package that Choice had recently installed. Choice agreed to provide financial services until Sunburst could get its own systems up, but the price tag for a stand-alone PeopleSoft installation was prohibitive for the new company.

Turning to Application Services Provider (ASP) USi turned out to be a very satisfactory alternative, according to Chuck Warczak, Vice President - Finance and Systems for Sunburst. "We had no up-front cost at all," says Warczak, " and no extra support staff to bring up to speed. We just set up the connection to USi, switched it on and started using it."

What were the main concerns? "Picking the right company is crucial. With so much responsibility off-loaded to the ASP, you must choose one with a rock-solid understanding of the product - how it works, why it's set up a certain way - and one who you can work with as a partner, not just as a supplier of programs and screens. USi has been excellent in that regard; we were their first PeopleSoft client, yet they've been right there for us at all times. And when there were a couple of issues with the application, they were able to exercise much more clout with PeopleSoft than we'd have been able to do on our own."

The three main concerns many companies have about using ASPs are performance, reliability and the impact of "instant-on" upgrades; with everyone accessing the same server, all users are upgraded at the same time. Sunburst's experience has been good in all three.

"Both performance and reliability have been excellent," says Warczak. "We have a T1 connection to the main USi office, which is relatively close to us, physically. We lost the T1 one time, but within 30 minutes were back up and running on USi's redundant server in California, which is kept fully up to date with the main unit through real-time replication. All our data was already there; we just changed the connection and were back up and running quickly."

"Significant upgrades have been handled well; "our" copy of PeopleSoft is on a separate server at USi, so we didn't have to switch over until all our staff had been trained and we were ready. We have been caught out by minor point releases from PeopleSoft itself, which sometimes have disabled certain functions we rely on, but it's been a great help to have USi's expertise and clout to get these corrected."

"Overall, we 're very pleased we took this step. We went live in April 1999, and haven't missed one deadline or SEC reporting date yet - and that can't always be said of some internal operations!"

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