Applicast to host ERP applications

Newcomer Applicast this week will formally introduce a pair of rentable software services designed to make high-end applications more accessible to business users.

Applicast is offering business users SAP financial and Siebel Systems sales force management software hosted on Compaq servers running Windows NT, says John McGrory, president and CEO at the Mountain View, Calif., start-up.

Later this year, Applicast expects to expand its hosted software services with data warehousing and electronic commerce applications.

The applications are accessible via the Internet or over frame relay connections.

But Applicast, like other companies in the emerging application service provider (ASP) market, does not provide customers with network access services.

For those services, customers must go to separate ISPs or carriers.

Applicast has already started offering the services to a limited number of customers, including Flash Electronics and CoSign Communications.

CoSign, a new carrier switch manufacturer in Redwood, City, Calif., is using Applicast's SAP and Siebel services.

It would have been tough for a new company such as CoSign to get such sophisticated back-end applications up and running in house while also trying to get the business launched, says Curtis Dudnick, CoSign's chief financial officer. The temptation would have been to start with lower-end applications and migrate SAP and Siebel later, but that can be inefficient, he says.

"By outsourcing these applications, we now have a lot of experts that are always available," Dudnick says. "It saves CoSign money in the long run."

It's that kind of thinking that has market researchers projecting big things for the ASP market. International Data Corp., for instance, expects the market for ASP services to hit $2 billion by 2003.

ASPs such as Applicast, Corio and USinternetworking generally are making high-end applications available to midsize companies that typically don't have the IT staff needed to focus on the deployment and ongoing maintenance of such software, says Meredith McCarty, senior analyst at IDC.

Unlike some of its competitors, Applicast is not building its own data centers to house its customers' servers and applications. Rather, Applicast is collocating all its servers in GTE Data Systems' data center in Tampa, Fla. Corio is taking a similar approach through its relationship with Exodus Communications.

Applicast engineers monitor and manage customers' servers from Applicast's headquarters through a dedicated T-1 link to GTE's data center.

GTE has three other data centers in the U.S. that Applicast will also use in the future. Applicast's McGrory points out that the company can today support mirrored servers at other locations, but that the company's current customers have not asked for that type of support to date.

Applicast started a year ago under the name Plenan Systems. In the past year, the company received its first round of venture capital from Sippl Macdonald Ventures and MKS Ventures.

Applicast: (650) 210-0270