IBM, Cisco team up on ASP effort

IBM and Cisco said they would jointly develop new services for application service providers (ASPs), who rent the software to customers on a per-user basis, to enable them to deliver corporate software over the Web. ASPs maintain application software on servers. The IBM-Cisco services will compete with similar solutions from Oracle, Exodus Communications and Intel, which are offering Web hosting services through their new network of server farms. The market for software and services delivered online will reach into the tens of billions of dollars in the next few years.