NetStore Group Ltd has become the first company from the European Union to join the Application Service Provider (ASP) consortium, bringing the industry body’s membership to 51 in just over four weeks since its launch at last month’s Networld+Interop 99 show in the US. The ASP is the brain child of Traver Gruen-Kennedy, an executive of Citrix Systems Inc, and Cameron Chell, president of FutureLink Distribution Corp, and is intended to become a forum for developing standards and codes of practice covering the emerging remote application service space.
According to Gruen-Kennedy, the ASP’s chairman, NetStore’s status as the sole EU member of the consortium says more about his decision to promote its activities in the US and Australia first, than any lack of interest in the continent. Several other European companies are currently finishing the paperwork, and their membership will be announced soon, he said.
Since its launch in May, the ASP has attracted the support of AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Of these only IBM meets the consortium’s definition of an ASP as a company that manages and delivers application capabilities to multiple entities from a data center across a wide area network. However, Gruen-Kennedy said the raison d’etre of the group is to recognize that remote application service delivery is a business that relies on independent software vendors, ASPs, network service providers and value added resellers cooperating to meet a common customer service level agreement.
With this in mind, all categories of IT product and service companies will be encouraged to join and contribute to the development of service standards and a certification process that will ultimately match and complement the rigor of the established ISO 9000 business practice standard. Already, says, Gruen-Kennedy, Ernst & Young, one of the groups founding members, is working to establish an ASP standards and certification practice, which will implement the ideas which the ASP’s early forum groups expect to produce in the next several months.
