In this review, ASP means application service provider: a company that hosted business software and made it available to customers as a service. It does not mean Microsoft’s separate technology, Active Server Pages, used to create dynamic webpages. In 1999, the documented story of application service providers was chiefly one of vendor announcements, pilot programs, and partnerships—not independently established market-wide success.
What did application service providers offer in 1999?
The idea was to let organizations use business applications hosted by a provider rather than operate every application themselves. Microsoft’s announcements described offerings that ranged from online commerce and messaging to collaboration and enterprise software. Those examples show what vendors were promoting; they do not, by themselves, establish how widely customers adopted the services or how well they performed.
- Commerce: Microsoft’s Complete Commerce program targeted hosted business-to-consumer commerce for medium and large enterprises.
- Messaging and collaboration: Microsoft described providers offering managed Exchange messaging and Office 2000 collaboration.
- Other hosted services: Announced examples included corporate purchasing, media streaming, and line-of-business applications.
- Enterprise applications: Microsoft named Qwest Cyber.Solutions as offering managed SAP R/3 and Siebel hosting on Windows NT Server and SQL Server.
Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said the company was seeing customer demand for Windows NT application hosting as a way to save on total cost of ownership. That was an executive’s characterization in a Microsoft announcement, not a measured demand statistic.
What happened in 1999?
April: Cisco announced a hosted-applications ecosystem
Cisco announced a Hosted Applications initiative intended to connect software vendors, service providers, system integrators, and technology partners. Participants named by Cisco included Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, KPMG, Sprint, and Citrix. The announcement documents a planned partner ecosystem; it does not establish that every planned service launched or reached customers.
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September: Microsoft’s Complete Commerce program reached general availability
On September 13, Microsoft announced general availability of Complete Commerce for ASPs. Microsoft said the program had begun as a pilot in November 1998 with 10 service providers and had grown to 25 by the September 1999 announcement. The figures describe Microsoft’s own program, not the ASP industry as a whole.
The program was aimed at hosted business-to-consumer commerce for medium and large enterprises. In the same announcement cycle, Microsoft pointed to the range of services providers were adding, including managed Exchange, Office 2000 collaboration, purchasing, streaming media, and line-of-business applications.
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October: Microsoft announced deployment and readiness programs
At ISPCON on October 26, Microsoft introduced ASP deployment kits for business-service hosting, an Office Server Extensions Program for hosted collaboration, and a Windows 2000 Readiness Program to prepare providers for Windows 2000-based hosting. These were announced tools and programs. Microsoft’s claim that providers were increasingly adopting its platform should be understood as the company’s own framing.
December: Microsoft outlined its platform strategy
At a two-day ASP Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft described a strategy built around Windows DNA 2000, Visual Studio, SQL Server, COM+, and application services. It named Pandesic and Digex as companies using or aligned with that architecture. The summit account’s text dates the speech to December 2, 1999, although the page’s search metadata labels it October 19; the body date is the more direct indication of when the event took place.
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How large was the ASP market?
The announcements provide snapshots of individual company programs and claims, not a neutral measure of the sector. Microsoft reported that WebJump hosted more than 512,000 websites on Windows NT, which it said represented more than 5 percent of internet sites tracked by Netcraft. That figure was reported by Microsoft and attributed there to Netcraft; it is not an independently checked ASP market-share measure.
The reviewed contemporaneous material does not establish an independent, market-wide adoption rate, customer-satisfaction measure, or comparative performance study for ASPs in 1999. Provider counts, partner lists, and statements of customer interest show activity and intent, but they cannot alone demonstrate broad adoption, reliability, cost savings, or successful customer outcomes.
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What the 1999 record shows—and what it does not
- It shows concrete initiatives: Cisco described a partner ecosystem, while Microsoft announced a commerce program and hosting tools.
- It shows a wide application range: the offerings discussed included commerce, messaging, collaboration, purchasing, media streaming, and enterprise software.
- It shows one program moving from pilot to general availability: Microsoft said Complete Commerce expanded from 10 providers at its November 1998 pilot launch to 25 by September 1999.
- It does not prove industry-wide success: the available announcements are evidence of what companies said they were doing, not an independent accounting of adoption or results.
For historical comparison, the most defensible dimensions are application type, intended customer segment, named technology or hosting partners, and program stage—such as pilot, announced program, general availability, or named deployment. The documented evidence does not support ranking providers by price, service quality, reliability, or customer outcomes.
Quick Recap
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