NEW YORK (06/27/2000) - Looking to articulate best practices and agree upon standards, 19 vendors have formed a management service provider consortium.

MSPs offer enterprises management and monitoring services based on a subscription fee. Though the industry is still in its infancy, its ranks of late have been growing, and some analysts estimate it could garner as much as US$10 billion in revenue by 2004.

Now, seeking to position their nascent industry within the overall IT market, 19 MSP vendors Tuesday announced their new association at PC Expo. As is to be expected, most of the founding members of the MSP Association are startups such as SilverBack Technologies, but established network and application management platform vendor Hewlett-Packard Co. also is in the ranks.

Though the group hasn't released many details, the mission of the MSP Association will be to promote open standards, education and research. In the next few weeks, the association will hold its first meeting and elect officers, as well as work out a list of priorities and form working committees, according to the group's Web site.

The full list of members includes: 2ndWave, Candle, Entuity, HP, InteQ, iSharp, Luminate, Manage.Com, ManageIT, McAfee.com, NCMX, Nuclio, SilverBack, SiteLite, siteROCK, Storability, StorageNetworks, TriActive and UP 7/24.

For more information, go to www.mspassociation.org.