ASG has added Business Service Management (BSM) to its plethora of IT/business management technology offerings of metadata, applications, operations, content, performance, security, and infrastructure management. With the release of its Business Service Platform (BSP), the company offers a suite that can be customized to help individual organizations create a unified view of how business services relate to the underlying technology that enables them.

“Today ASG is a pure-play BSM provider with a strong enterprise backbone,” says Parker Hathcock, ASG’s corporate public relations manager. “This is a tremendous and long-anticipated transition for our company.”

BSM, according to Forrester Research, “dynamically links business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure.” Hathcock adds, “Unless all of these many IT elements are working smoothly, the company is unable to function….BSM, when properly and penetratingly implemented, can provide a high level of business assurance, a speedy response time for problems and even the ability to foresee problems by enabling ‘what if’ analysis of complex business service systems.”

Built on ASG’s MetaCMDB and powered by ASG-Rochade, BSP uses ASG’s Unified Management Architecture along with a series of intelligent adapters to collect strategic data from infrastructure elements and applications, and from existing monitoring software. Users can define their own monitoring criteria.

BSP accomplishes two main goals: reducing costs by enabling organizations to improve application and system availability while responding to business change; and improving business service delivery by implementing dashboards that allow users to identify and address problem issues before they reach the service desk. The solution identifies, correlates, and aligns the relationship between IT investments and overall business performance.

“ASG’s BSP allows IT executives and business managers to deliver the business value of their current commitments, freeing them to focus on the future and the growth of their organization,” Hathcock explains.

The company’s solution is flexible and allows businesses to implement BSM on a large or small scale. ASG believes that flexibility, along with its technology, breadth and depth of monitoring tools, and end-user performance management set it apart from its competitors, Hathcock says.

Pricing for the MetaCMDB, the main component of BSP, starts at $150,000. Licenses vary after that depending on what is added. A typical configuration is priced from $1 million to $1.5 million.

ASG launched the product in March and is in the process of installing it with four clients worldwide. In addition, the company has shown more than 100 proof-of-concepts for the product since that time.

Competitors include IBM, BMC, and Computer Associates.

For more information, go to: www.asg.com