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Microsoft Announces Next Phase of Application Hosting Programs

Microsoft Corp. announced that its Complete Commerce program for Application Service Providers (ASPs) has moved out of the pilot phase and into general availability. Complete Commerce is now available to service providers seeking a solution for hosting outsourced business-to-consumer direct selling commerce solutions.

Building on a series of partnerships, equity investments and pilots established over the last year, many of these Application Service Providers are now offering additional application hosting services, including managed Microsoft Exchange messaging, Office 2000 collaboration, corporate purchasing, media streaming and line of business application services on Windows NT.

"We are seeing a lot of demand from customers for applications hosting on the Windows NT platform to save on total cost of ownership," said Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft. "Microsoft has been engaged in a variety of commercial licensing, certification and application service deployment pilot projects over the last year to better understand market requirements across a variety of applications and customer needs. Based on this learning, several of these projects are now moving to the next phase or into full production."

The pilot project began in November 1998 with 10 service providers and the program has expanded to 25 service providers. The Application Service Providers involved with the trials of are looking for a scalable, easy-to-administer infrastructure for hosting any Windows-based application. In addition, further trials of network-based directory services using Active Directory and business process integration services built on the BizTalk server are planned for later this year.

Participants in the program include Concentric Network, DataReturn, Digex, Exodus, GTE Internetworking, USInternetworking, Interliant, MCIWorldCom, NaviSite, US Web and Qwest. -- Thomas Sullivan

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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