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Sage jumps on Web-hosting bandwagon

Sage's Business Solutions Group is offering database, e-commerce, and multimedia services to small-to-midsize companies, resellers, and Web developers.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Sage Networks is the latest in a growing field of firms scrambling to roll out Web hosting services.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Sage today launched a suite of applications the company will manage for small-, medium-, and large corporate clients.

Sage's Business Solutions Group (BSG) is offering database, e-commerce, and multimedia services to small-to-midsize companies, resellers, and Web developers.

Meanwhile, Sage's Enterprise Solutions Group (ESG) will focus on higher-end hosting services to midsize and large businesses that have large bandwidth requirements.

Sage's umbrella of Web services for both BSG and ESG customers includes Web site management, server management with 24-hour support, dedicated hosting, development of e-commerce software applications for secure transactions, management of virtual shopping environments and payment services, and email hosting.

Over the past year, privately held Sage has acquired 12 Internet companies to strengthen its services. The company competes against other upstarts and more established players, including Usinternetworking, Corio, ServiceNet, USWeb/CKS, as well as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), for a piece of the growing rent-an-application market.

Forrester Research predicts the applications outsourcing market will grow to more than $6 billion by 2001.