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Lotus Development this week will make its most significant push into the application hosting market, a move that should enable more customers to choose between building their own collaborative applications based on Domino or getting them through a service provider.

The company is expected to introduce its ASP Solution Pack, a list of pricing options and third-party supporters, according to sources. The pack is designed for application service providers (ASPs) that want to host collaborative and electronic-commerce applications, and to ease development of those applications.

The pack, which Lotus first publicly discussed about a year ago, is a complete hosting platform and comprises technologies from Lotus and parent company IBM. It will integrate Lotus's Domino and Sametime instant messaging servers, and IBM's WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database.

Lotus, which declined to comment on the announcement, has dabbled in the application hosting market for a few years without great success. The company's focus has been on its Instant TeamRoom document-sharing application and partnerships with service providers, such as Interliant. But Lotus's hosting platform was based solely on Domino, and mostly due to limitations in that software, the platform and available applications never reached critical mass.

Target: SMEs

Lotus and IBM hope to correct that with ASP Solution Pack.

The pack's linchpin is middleware called Hosting Management System (HMS), which provides automated billing management and administrative functions and the ability to host multiple applications on one server.

It also lets existing applications run on the platform. The predecessor to HMS, called Domino Instant Host, required applications to be written to a special set of APIs. The result was that few hosted Domino applications were available.

With HMS, potentially thousands of applications could be moved to the hosted platform. With support for WebSphere, ASPs will host sophisticated e-commerce and transaction-based applications that won't run on Domino.

Lotus hopes the platform will appeal to ASPs looking to serve the market of small to midsize businesses. According to Framingham, Massachusetts, research firm IDC, the ASP market will grow to $7.8 billion by 2004.

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