Corio
An early pioneer of hosted ERP software, offering enterprise applications without on-site installation — one of the clearest technical previews of modern SaaS, built on 1999-era infrastructure and 1999-era revenue.
Chapter One · 1997–2002
The ASP boom and bust: the cloud's dot-com casualties
None of this required hindsight to see coming — analysts were publishing the optimistic numbers right alongside the companies that would miss them.
The receipts
- $25.3BGartner's forecast for ASP market revenue by 2004, made near the height of ASP hype
- 72%Approximate NASDAQ decline within one year of its March 2000 peak
- $63.5MPrice Loudcloud sold its hosting business for in 2002, after raising well over $300M total
- 500+ASPs operating by 2000; a large share would not survive the following two years
- $37MLoudcloud's actual Q3 2000 booked contracts, against a $100M internal forecast
- 1999Year Salesforce, Loudcloud, and the ASP Industry Consortium all launched — the same year the crash began preparing to end most of them
Named casualties (and one survivor)
USinternetworking
Went public in 1999 as one of the higher-profile ASPs of the era. Filed for bankruptcy in 2002; its assets were later acquired by AT&T.
Salesforce
The survivor. Went public in 2004, five years after its “No Software” launch stunt, and is still — somewhat ironically — a software company today.
“The cloud” spent the early 2000s looking, to most of the trade press, like a phrase that had already peaked. It would take another four years, and a very different company, to prove that timing — not the idea — had been the problem.
— roughly the consensus view, circa 2002