what does it mean for an application to be a service
(April 2007). An Application Service Provider (ASP) is a business providing computer-based services to customers over a network; such as access to a particular software application (such as customer relationship management) using a standard protocol (such as HTTP).SPs may or may not use multitenancy in the deployment of software to clients; some ASPs offer an instance or license to each customer (for example using Virtualization), some deploy in a single instance multi-tenant access mode, now more frequently referred to as SaaS.