Global Financial Services Firm Improves Risk Management with ASG's Application Portfolio Management Solution

Naples, Fla. - 21st July 2009 - ASG Software Solutions, the originator of ASG's Business Service Portfolio™ (BSP™) and a worldwide leader in business solutions for global enterprises, today announced the release of an upgraded version of ASG-becubic™ and its new BSP Application Portfolio Analysis solution. ASG-becubic 7.3, the core technology of ASG's BSP Application Portfolio Analysis, provides an end-to-end view into an enterprise's complete application portfolio, delivering the critical insight necessary for IT organizations to reduce costs and strategically manage their limited resources.

A leading provider of consumer finance in more than 20 countries around the world uses ASG-becubic to manage the entire breadth and depth of its application portfolio, which spans a wide range of technologies in both mainframe and distributed environments. Using ASG-becubic, the company has gained detailed insight into the risks, patterns, and trends within its application portfolio, which has reduced application failures.

News Facts

• New features of ASG-becubic 7.3
  • An updated metrics package, including a new Maintainability Index metric (which alerts IT managers to applications that have grown large and cumbersome)
  • An ODBC driver, which equips business analysts with the expansive SQL query capabilities needed for in-depth application analysis and portfolio management

• ASG-becubic's key differentiators
  
  • Supported technologies: No other application mining and application portfolio management (APM) solution supports more technologies across both mainframe and distributed environments
  • Industrial strength and scalability: A financial institution in South America currently uses ASG-becubic to maintain and modernize 300,000 production programs and 120 million lines of code
  • Integration: The ASG-becubic repository can be federated with ASG's metaCMDB™ or another comprehensive Configuration Management System (CMS) for use in ITIL® implementations and Business Service Management (BSM) initiatives

• ASG's BSP Application Portfolio Analysis (which includes ASG-becubic 7.3)
  
  • A new Level 2 solution in ASG's Path to Optimization program
  • Functions as an intermediary step between application discovery and APM
  • Provides application portfolio monitoring throughout the application lifecycle via drill-down dashboards
  • Clarifies the "where" and "why" of application maintenance and support costs

Quotes
IT manager, global financial services firm
"With tens of millions of customers and 20,000 employees globally, we can't afford to allow our applications to underperform. ASG-becubic allows us to easily understand and manage the entire breadth and depth of our application portfolios. We're particularly excited about the new release [ASG-becubic 7.3] because it will equip us to increase our number of users, integrate metrics, and incorporate a Web interface."

Phil Murphy. "Strategies to Cut Application Costs and Increase Productivity Using Application Mining Tools: Increase Productivity and Quality While Reducing Exposure to Risk." Cambridge: Forrester Research, 24 April 2009.

"[T]he consensus among customers about productivity improvements is that developers and analysts see gains that range as high as 70% and more for pure analysis activities. However, given the broad range of activities that developers and analysts perform, most customers approximate total productivity gains[from application mining tools] in the 10% to 20% range across all activities ..."

Julie Craig. Increasing ROI and Reducing the Risks of Your Application Portfolio." Boulder: EMA, Oct. 2008.
"ASG-becubic provides comprehensive application visibility from dual points of view, including both IT and the business perspectives."

Stephen Mann. "Technology Audit: ASG-becubic." Butler Group, April 2009.
"Butler Group believes that the true value of ASG-becubic can be exploited when deployed as a part of an overall APM initiative, i.e., in conjunction with ADM and application portfolio analysis tools, with a CMDB as its core underpinning technology."

Supporting Resources

• White paper: Application Portfolio Optimization by Clarity Consulting
• Related press release: ASG's Path to Optimization Approach Validated By Leading Organizations
• Related Web page: ASG's Applications Management

About ASG | www.asg.com
ASG provides software solutions to more than 85 percent of the world's largest companies. Through its comprehensive Business Service Management (BSM) solution, Business Service Portfolio™, ASG is an established BSM provider with a strong heritage in information management; applications management; infrastructure, performance, and operations management; and service and support technologies. ASG enables clients to reduce costs, improve business-service delivery, and reduce risks. Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held company based in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 90 offices worldwide.

Contacts:

ASG
Tulin Pledger
+44 1784 484 700
tulin.pledger@asg.com

Ruder Finn
Hannah Smith
+44 207 462 8900
hsmith@ruderfinn.co.uk