ASP is also an abbreviation for Active Server

Page.

An application service provider (ASP) is a company that offers individuals or enterprises access

over the Internet to applications and related services that would otherwise have to be located in

their own personal or enterprise computers. Sometimes referred to as "apps-on-tap," ASP services

are expected to become an important alternative, not only for smaller companies with low budgets

for information technology, but also for larger companies as a form of outsourcing and for many services

for individuals as well. Early applications include:

Remote

access serving for the users of an enterprise

An off-premises local area network to which mobile users can be connected, with a common file

server

Specialized applications that would be expensive to install and maintain within your own

company or on your own computer

Hewlett-Packard, SAP, and Qwest have

formed one of the first major alliances for providing ASP services. They plan to make SAP's popular

R/3 applications available at

"cybercenters" that will serve the applications to other companies. Microsoft is allowing some

companies to offer its BackOffice products, including SQL Server, Exchange and Windows NT Server on

a rental, pay-as-you-use basis.

While ASPs are forecast to provide applications and services to small enterprises and

individuals on a pay-per-use or yearly license basis, larger corporations are essentially providing

their own ASP service in-house, moving applications off personal computers and putting them on a

special kind of application server

that is designed to handle the stripped-down kind of thin client

workstation. This allows an enterprise to reassert the central control over application cost and

usage that corporations formerly had in the period prior to the advent of the PC. Microsoft's Terminal

Server product and Citrix's  products are leading thin-client application server products.

Related glossary terms:

Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Java Message Service (JMS), appliance computing, JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface), table, redirection, WS-AtomicTransaction (WS-AT), Portal Markup Language (PML), URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), Internet map

This was last updated in November 2010

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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