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New ASP Venture Targets Enterprise E-business - Company Business and Marketing

Verio and CIBER login forces to launch Agilera.com

ANEW BREED OF APPLICATION Service Providers (ASPs) is moving up higher into the food chain, combining front-end expertise with professional IT know-how. While early ASPs primarily focused on the low end of the market, offering solutions to dot-corns looking for infrastructure, the new type of ASP targets companies with end-to-end sophisticated needs.

Take, for example, Agilera.com, Englewood, Colo., a recently formed joint venture by Verio Inc., a large Web-hosting firm, and CIBER Inc., a leading integrator, both based in Englewood. Backed by Colorado's largest venture capital firm, Centennial Ventures, Agilera.com is combining the application integration expertise of CIBER with Vetio's established Internet infrastructure, which includes a Tier One national network and leading Web hosting platform.

"IT shops weren't getting any attention from ASPs," says Steve Dryden, Agilera.com senior vice president of strategic development. "Start-up companies without infrastructure, old policies, and procedures are easy to implement, but the majority of companies have established infrastructures. These companies holding market share today aren't going to sit back and let the dot-coins rake over their business."

Agility Plus Stability

Dryden says that the opportunity for Agilera.com lies in helping established mid-size companies become more agile, respond to the market faster, and successfully compete with the dot-coms. In order to position its offerings as Internet-enabled, end-to-end enterprise and c-business solutions, Agilera.com has to have substantial IT expertise.

"CIBER has over 6,000 IT professionals that do implementation and integration," says Dryden. "This joint venture between GIBER and Verio makes sense--one has all the expertise and the other has all the infrastructure. We give our clients dot-corn agility and Fortune 500 stability."

Lisa Williams, senior analyst, The Yankee Group, Boston, called Agilera.com an ASP with a new type of offering--a personalized application portal view, outsourcing expertise, and established Internet infrastructure.

Agilera.com hosts all the applications for Atlanta-based SCI Companies, an outsourcing provider of integrated HR suites. SCI services over 350 clients that vary in size, ranging from 20 to 6,500 employees. "What was attractive to us is that Agilera.com already has a hardware-infrastructure backbone," says Henry Hardin, SCI president and founder. "So we didn't have to create one. There's a real niche for ASPs to leverage applications for mid-size companies."