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To: arthur pritchard who wrote (152037)	1/26/2000 11:35:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

arthur - ASP in this context stands for "application service provider", a company which takes an application created by a traditional software developer and makes it available to users from a central or several distributed locations, usually for a fee but in some cases for free. ASPs are expert in the care and feeding of the applications and in the quick solution of user problems. These services in amny cases are so efficient that they can cut the costs of IT management by 50%... so it's a hot business. But the ASPs are not hardware manufacturers or systems guys, and so the big infrastructure players want to get out in front as "provisioners" for that business - providing the servers, network services, remote backup, etc. That part of it is "hosting". CPQ and MSFT have announced plans to aggressively go after that business, leading with MSFT products but supporting every hosting need. CPQ therefore deploys not only NT based solutions but also Linux, the old DEC Unix now known as Tru64, and of course the Tandem Himalaya systems for ultra-reliable back end support. In addition to the partnerships with Digex, the venture with Cable and Wireless, and their previous work with folks like Exodus, CPQ has developed infrastructure components around an initiative they call "ZLE" (which I think stands for Zero Latency Enterprise), which is a framework which links business information from different applications to allow consolidated deployment and administration. Intel and DELL have not been idle in this space but their efforts have been a little less public. Together, both have taken the position that a "vanilla" provisioning scheme, primarily based on Linux, will be the easiest to administer and the lowest cost, and both companies have made a lot of investment in Linux-related companies to assure a complete infrastructure.