ASP eCedar announced its first customer win last week. The resulting contract entails the delivery of eCedar's flagship product, Cedar Financials, as well as its time-tracking application, Cedar Track, to Twister, a division of Shell International. Twister is marketing new technology for increasing the efficiency of gas and oil pipeline transmission. <P> "ECedar was chosen because their solution is quick to implement and will scale immediately," explains Kees Tjeenk Willink, CEO of the Twister division of Shell. "The e-sourcing of this service reduces our risks considerably and allows us full visibility of our financial position," he adds. <P> Retaining a global organization with the market share that Shell enjoys is a vote of confidence for the ASP market, and a significant win for eCedar. With a go-live date of Sept. 1, eCedar claims to be the first major ASP contract in the oil and gas industry, despite the efforts of competitors such as Futurelink and Geonet Services. <P> ECedar, launched last October, is a division of the British software vendor Cedar Group PLC. It is supported by partners Worldcom, which provides connectivity, and Compaq Computer, which provides managed data centers.