Apr 26th 1999: Internetworking giant Cisco Systems has swung its full weight behind the ASP industry with the announcement today of its Hosted Application Initiative (HAI).

The programme is a mixture of marketing, education and technology commitments designed to help speed the takeup of application services amongst small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Cisco has gathered together a roll-call of leading industry names to back the initiative, including top-name vendors, integrators, service providers and telcos as well as leading ASPs.

All the participants are backing the message to SMEs that Internet-hosted applications are easier, faster and cheaper for them to deploy and grow with than traditional installed applications.

Cisco believes demand for e-business solutions will quickly drive hosted apps to become a multi-billion dollar market. "My belief is that as much as half the market will look for an application service provider to get them into the e-business market - maybe a significantly higher proportion in the small and medium size business sector," Alan Cohen, Cisco's managing director of Internet business solutions told ASP News Review today.

Cisco, based in San Jose CA, has outlined various activities in support of what it calls "this emerging ecosystem" among its partner vendors and service providers:

A Hosted Applications Development Lab to provide vendors and service providers with integration and benchmarking services that will help them maximise the performance of hosted applications running on Cisco-based Internet infrastructures.

Cisco Powered Network accreditation for application service providers, giving them access to joint marketing and selling opportunities with Cisco for their service offerings.

A Jumpstart Program to help application service providers define and then jointly market new application hosting and outsourcing services.

It is also continuing to develop its IOS internetworking platform to enhance support for network-based applications. Developments in the pipeline include extending the types of applications supported by Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), a standard for dynamically reserving end-to-end bandwidth for delay-sensitive IP traffic. RSVP currently supports certain multimedia applications. Sources said it was likely to add support for Citrix ICA in the near future, allowing network managers to prioritise traffic from servers running Windows terminal applications.

Among others, the initiative has brought the heavyweight influence of 'big five' business consultancy KPMG into a newly-announced alliance with Cisco to back ASPs. Its consultants will act as business and technology advisors to help providers develop and market hosted application solutions. The firm believes its trusted reputation among the business community will help speed market acceptance of ASP offerings.

Other high-profile supporters of the Cisco initiative include leading US telcos GTE, Sprint and US West, top computing vendors Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Sequent, and a broad spread of leading Internet and application service providers.