Updated: July 11, 2020 (August 28, 2000)
Analyst ReportMicrosofts ASP Strategy Takes Shape
The exploding application service provider (ASP) market has become a critical competitive arena for Microsoft. Actively courted by IBM, Oracle, and Sun, ASPs are excellent prospects for many of Microsofts latest products, such as Windows 2000 Datacenter, Application Center Server, and Exchange 2000, which are the first Microsoft products with the scalability and reliability that ASPs require. But the ASP model is not the endgame for Microsoft: that market poses many uncertainties for the company. Instead, Microsoft wants to move the industry “beyond the ASP” to its .NET platform, built around Microsofts traditional strength on the client desktop and its growing strength in server operating systems and Web-savvy database and collaboration tools.
What ASP Means to Microsoft
The application hosting business, in its current incarnation, is based on renting applications to users. The ASP hosts the applications on its own (or rented) servers, and the interface to the applications is thin-client softwaretypically a Web browseron the users machine. Little or no special software is installed on the users computer, and the application runs primarily on the servers CPU and in the servers memory space. The ASP model promises companies lower software management costs, the option to rent software they could not afford to purchase, and rapid deployment of applications to their users desktops.
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