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NEWS
Feb 28th 2000: SAP's ASP spin-off and a German ASP consortium added to ASP fever at CeBIT last week. The global computer industry's biggest annual show, held in Hannover, Germany, also saw ASP announcements from European computing giant Siemens, Danish ERP vendor Damgaard, and others. SAP on Thursday (Feb 24th) announced the formation of a new spin-off company to offer hosted SAP solutions as an ASP. Due to launch in April with an initial headcount of up to 50 employees, it will target small and medium-size businesses with hosted solutions based on the mySAP.com enterprise portal and electronic marketplace platforms. It will offer per-user, per-month rental as well as more traditional infrastructure and application outsourcing services. ASP industry leaders Cisco Systems, Citrix, HP, Microsoft, SAP and UUnet joined with German ASPs Einsteinet and Victor Vox to launch a local industry body that will establish and promote a regional ASP model for Central Europe. They intend to formally incorporate it Mar 22nd as the German ASP Association. Other infrastructure providers such as SCO are still considering whether to join. The group intends to define attitudes and policies between ASPs, their customers, and other organisations such as banks. The aim is to encourage highly-conservative German small and mid-size businesses - known locally as the Mittelstaendische Unternehmen - to really trust ASPs right from the start. Other similar local groups are likely to be founded in other European countries, group members said. "We want to focus on the special needs of German customers, whose first concern is security," Stephan Deutsch, spokesperson for UUnet Germany, told ASP News Review. High-profile German startup Einsteinet, based in Elmshorn, Germany, illustrates the greater emphasis placed on security in the German business market. The ASP has acquired class 3 and 4 telecoms provider licences from the German telecoms regulator and is building its own private network infrastructure to deliver services to business customers. It does not believe German businesses will accept virtual private network connections, although home users will be connected via standard Internet dial-up connections. Services for these two groups of customers will run on different server clusters. Einsteinet, which launched last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, will start initial trials on leased lines early March this year. It plans to go ahead with public test operations in May and move onto full commercial services from August. Victor Vox, another participant in the group, plans to offer intelligent business communications, office services and e-commerce based on Sun StarOffice and other software. Based in Krefeld, Germany, it has already been running Windows terminal-based operations for 2000 mobile phone dealers since late 1998. In other CeBIT announcements, Copenhagen, Denmark-based ERP vendor Damgaard unveiled an ASP implementation of its ERP suite provided by new German ASP venture indecom independent computing, headquartered in Friedrichsdorf. Leading IT services provider Siemens Business Services also launched an ASP offering for small and medium-sized businesses. As well as its own ASP spin-off, SAP announced two new ASP partnerships in the UK market last week. Boca Raton-based HostLogic, which also has offices in Geneva, Switzerland, cut a deal with SAP UK to offer mySAP.com solutions to transatlantic businesses. Meanwhile, Netherlands-based global outsourcing and IT services provider Origin became a SAP preferred ASP for small and medium businesses in the UK. It will offer mySAP.com-based ERP solutions starting from as little as £125 ($200) per user per month with no upfront costs. Reporting from Hannover by Bernd Kretschmer
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