Another long-term burden the customer avoids is hardware maintenance and software upgrades. Quite apart from the cost, these can be disruptive to business, and are often extremely difficult exercises needing specialist skills. All these activities live inside the black box and are looked after by e-know.

The company also fosters a sense of community amongst its ASP customers, making help desk information and known faults available to the users, so problems can sometimes be solved more quickly by users themselves rather than through customer support.