"We've quickly become the largest application services provider in the market in terms of revenues. We are the largest application services provider in the world," said Bob Wise, chief operating officer of the company's E-Services division in an interview yesterday with ASP News Review.

Motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson, broadcaster NBC, and the World Economic Forum are among some twenty customers already using USWeb's application services. The most radical implementation is at National Airlines, a new US passenger airline setting up shop in Las Vegas NV with an initial $50m in venture capital backing. National is obtaining all of its IT as application services delivered by USWeb/CKS, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), aircraft maintenance systems, data warehousing, messaging and Internet/extranet.

The USWeb/CKS E-Services division announced its application services portfolio Monday (Feb 22nd), and named an initial three out of a total ten to fifteen offerings within the portfolio that it expects to have launched by mid-year.

There are four categories within the portfolio: e-commerce, communications and knowledge management, customer relationship management (CRM) and back office. The application services offered are packaged implementations based either on custom development previously done by USWeb/CKS itself or on third-party applications, or a mix of the two.

This week's announcements did not include any big name packaged app vendors. Offerings in the e-commerce, CRM and back office categories will be announced later and are expected to include services based on software from Broadvision, Vantive and other vendors including at least one top-tier ERP vendor.

The application services announced this week were all in the communications and knowledge management category. Communications Central, which is already in use by the World Economic Forum and two other customers, is a collaboration suite for teleconferencing and meeting management. Presentations Central, which the company was using this week in phone briefings with journalists, is an interactive online presentation service. The third offering is a more traditional outsourced email, scheduling and workflow service based on Microsoft's messaging server, and is called Microsoft Exchange Services.

The company expects to announce an e-commerce service based on Microsoft's Complete Commerce hosting package next week.

Formed last October, the E-Services division currently has some 70 staff out of a total 2000 employed by the Santa Clara CA-based provider. With activities ranging from IT consultancy through Web hosting to marketing communications, the company as a whole currently claims an annualised turnover of $300m and is projecting a 70% growth rate this year.