ASG Business Service Platform™ addresses business service management, compliance and ITIL® issues with one package

London on 29 May 2007

ASG, an enterprise software provider to Global 5000 companies, has announced the availability of ASG-Business Service Platform (BSP™), a comprehensive suite of integrated software that enables organisations in the private and public sectors to achieve high levels of business service management (BSM) delivery.

The new solution from ASG will not only help organisations to improve business performance and enhance competitive edge, but also to comply with mandatory regulation and internal rules of governance, and support the adoption of and adherence to ITIL business service standards.

In a report published in February 2007 by one of the world’s leading market research companies, Forrester Research, a significant statistic was cited: “74 per cent of problems are reported by the end users through the service desk, not detected by infrastructure management.” *

ASG-BSP is designed to address this and other vital BSM issues by providing a complete set of tools that will: enable chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers to continually monitor the performance of their organisation’s IT resources in realtime; produce comprehensive and easily understood reports; and manage local and global systems more effectively. Consequently, the best service may always be delivered to users or customers, consistently and reliably.

The solution does this by gathering and consolidating data from many critical sources throughout the IT installation, including distributed applications and systems, databases, performance monitoring tools, infrastructure management tools, and service level agreements.

As a result, the performance of the whole network may be presented in a single ‘dashboard’ view, or in any format required by management. This level of monitoring, reporting and control supports the optimisation of BSM, and the aims and adherence to ITIL standards.

For example, intelligent service agents in ASG’s BSP may detect that an impaired router is affecting a critical business service. A problem ticket may be opened in a service desk application while a visual status indication also is displayed. These alerts are reported and shown in a clear and concise view customised to individual requirements. Consequently, corrective action may be taken before users become aware of the problem.

“Business service management has become a key issue as CIOs strive to make IT serve the needs of users more effectively and to gain far better value from the organisation’s often considerable investment in software, hardware and systems,” said Richard Vance, Executive Vice President of Operations at ASG.

“Along with these needs, increasing pressure to comply with new internal governance and external, mandatory regulations, plus the adoption and maintenance of ITIL, adds to the importance of achieving sustained IT business service excellence,” he continued.

ASG’s innovative technologies

ASG has made it possible to achieve higher levels of business service performance by bringing together two unique and well-established technologies developed by the company: ASG-Unified Management Architecture™ (UMA™) and ASG-Rochade®.

ASG-UMA is an IT architecture or framework that enables monitoring functions to be linked together from separate applications and IT infrastructures running on separate machines or systems. ASG-Rochade is the basis of a configuration management database (CMDB), a single repository of data for all elements in the IT environment essential to achieve effective BSM.

From this combination of substantial resources and other technologies, ASG’s BSP solution enables the exact location, scale and nature of potential and actual performance issues to be identified and resolved – often before the user or customer knows – thus saving time and costs and significantly improving IT service delivery.

* ’Managing IT From the End User Perspective in 2006’, Forrester Research, Inc., February 2, 2007.

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VERSION NOTES

Version 1

19.04.07

Copy e-mailed to Parker Hathcock for review by ASG, cc Florence Viret.

Version 2

11.05.07

Reviewed by Corporate PR and Forrester Research

Approved by Parker Hathcock

21.05.07