May 11th 1999: Leading ASPs joined to launch an industry consortium today, while two major telcos announced new ASP strategies. The announcements came on the opening day of the Networld+Interop trade show in Las Vegas.

Twenty-five founding members launched the ASP Industry Consortium, with the aim of raising awareness of the industry while promoting guidelines for best practice. Membership is open to all providers and vendors actively involved in application service provision.

Meanwhile, Qwest and US West each made their first major announcements as application service providers.

Qwest announced that it has joined with Hewlett-Packard and SAP America in a scheme to offer SAP R/3 as an Internet-accessed application. SAP will rent the application to users using Qwest as the data centre and delivery network provider. HP is providing the $500m-worth of data centre equipment on a revenue-sharing basis.

The new services will become available to business customers within the next few months as Qwest brings new application hosting centres online in California.

US West unveiled its application services strategy with the launch of a new business division called US West Hosting Solutions and the announcement of a Business Alliance Program.

The first two partners in the programme are leading business consultancy firm Deloitte Consulting and high-profile ASP USinternetworking. The purpose of the programme is to give US West customers access to specific IT solution provider expertise to meet requirements outside of the scope of the telco's own application services offerings, company officials said.

US West relaunched its own offerings under the Hosting Solutions umbrella. The three main components of the range are platform hosting, which provides a managed environment in which customers can run hosted applications; middleware and Web hosting, where US West hosts infrastructure-level applications such as Lotus Domino application servers, RealNetworks multimedia streaming, databases and web servers; and application hosting, which it said it is expanding significantly beyond its established Notes and Domino hosting services.

The purpose of the ASP Industry Consortium is to raise awareness of application services, act as a forum for discussion, foster open standards and promote best practice, its chairman Traver Gruen-Kennedy said at today's launch. Also on the podium was Cameron Chell, CEO of ASP Futurelink, based in Calgary AB, Canada, who is president of the group. It had been Chell who had first proposed forming the consortium, said Kennedy: "For his ASP to be successful he realised he would have to provide some leadership [in order] for the industry to be recognised."

The founding companies include top-tier names such as AT&T;, Cisco, Citrix, Compaq, Ernst & Young, GTE, IBM, Sun and Uunet, but there are also some notable omissions. The initial decision to form the came just eight weeks ago, and many companies have joined in the past few days or were planning to this week, said Kennedy. But others who were approached are known to have declined, including Redwood City CA based Corio and Annapolis MD based USinternetworking (USi).

"We wish the organisation well, but we didn't see any benefit in membership of it," USi's VP of marketing Michele Perry told ASP News Review today. "We've put our resources into getting customers and developing customers. That's what will drive the market. The market doesn't need programmes or partnerships, it needs proof statements."

There are five pureplay ASPs among the 25 founder members announced at the event, and three other organisations with active ASP divisions. The full list is Aristasoft, AT&T;, Boundless Technologies, Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, Compaq, Cylex Systems, Ernst & Young, Exodus, Futurelink, GTE, Great Plains Software, IBM, Interpath Communications, Jaws Technologies, Marimba, Onyx Software, Sasktel, Sharp Electronics, Sun Microsystems, Taylor Group, Telecomputing, Uunet, Verio and Wyse Technology.

The consortium is using a broad definition of ASP which, as well as mainstream service providers, includes public and voluntary groups who provide application services for free, or end user companies who provide them to customers and suppliers within an extranet.