In the belief that the ASP industry is being held back by the problem of ASP-enabling existing applications, IBM and Citrix have today announced a service that is intended to make it possible for software vendors to go "from nothing to the Net" in five days, as Citrix iBusiness VP Chris Phoenix put it. IBM's ASP Prime Solution Centres worldwide are intended to help developers to enable applications for Web hosting and Internet delivery, using the Citrix' Metaframe application server and Nfuse portal technology. IBM's centres are in Oregon and Minnesota, with plans announced today to add four additional centres: at Hursley, England; Sydney, Waltham, Mass. and San Mateo. IBM will be offering technical and marketing assistance to UNIX, NT and AS/4000 developers. There's a great deal of  investment, and probably consideable potential, in the ASP market, but so far there's not that much evidence of revenue. The IBM Citrix deal is intended to address best practices for service level agreements, provisioning, billing, settlement and data center management - but without adequate financial returns, it is all doomed. ®