Cisco and IBM Work Together to Accelerate the ASP Ecosystem
SAN JOSE, Calif. (October 18, 1999) – Cisco Systems, Inc. and IBM today announced that they will work together to address the needs of the growing number of Application Service Providers (ASPs). The announcement marks IBM’s commitment to support the Cisco Hosted Applications Initiative and to work closely with Cisco in enabling ASPs to build and test high quality hosted applications offerings. The two companies’ commitment and expertise in this market will allow ASPs to optimize quality of service (QoS) and virtual private network (VPN) service deployment and service level agreement (SLA) delivery end-to-end.
The Cisco Hosted Applications Initiative launched in April 1999, provides businesses of all sizes with access to powerful applications that were previously beyond their reach. The initiative creates an emerging ecosystem of software application vendors, hardware vendors, application service providers, internet service providers, co-location providers, system integrators, and technology partners to deliver a variety of hosted business applications.
“IBM and Cisco each have leading-edge technologies and skills for building robust, large scale system infrastructures,” said Robert Dana, vice president of technology for application services, Interliant, a leading ASP and Web hosting company. “Together, they offer ASPs a great foundation for getting quality, high performing applications to market more quickly.”
Wide-scale application hosting across the Internet demands an intelligent, end-to-end platform and network infrastructure to satisfy customer expectations for integration, reliability, security, and performance. As the leader in standards-based computing, IBM will provide the Cisco Hosted Applications lab with development platforms and highly skilled personnel from the San Mateo Solution Partnership Center to assist Cisco and ASPs in implementing, testing and fine-tuning networked e-business applications. The IBM San Mateo Solution Partnership Center provides software application developers with a multi-server platform environment to develop hostable and scalable applications. This will allow ASPs to offer customers value-added hosted applications solutions and services that have been thoroughly tested for ASP infrastructure environments by both IBM and Cisco.
“Application Service Providers and others looking to expand their current offerings into proven, value-added hosted services will benefit from the combined resources of Cisco and IBM,” said Jim Corgel, general manager, IBM Global Internet Service Provider Industry Unit. “ASPs can concentrate on growing their business knowing that the solutions they provide their customers are thoroughly tested and backed by industry leaders.”
Source: IBM