ASG Pitches Single Management Platform For Legacy IT and Cloud

ASG Software Solutions, which aims to help enterprises bridge the gap between business and IT processes, has added a new tool, called CloudFactory 8.0, to its arsenal, which manages both legacy and modern environments.

ASG has been around since 1986. Initially focused on mainframes, it started to look beyond that business in the early 2000s. Today, despite its fast-growing end-to-end cloud orchestration business and an annual revenue of more than $300 million, it's managed to stay relatively under the radar.

Rather than pitching a wholesale switch to cloud, ASG's model is to enable IT organizations to leverage their existing data center resources (mainframes, distributed and virtualized workloads) alongside their public cloud resources (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) and software investments (Microsoft, Citrix and VMware) under one management platform.

“CloudFactory 8.0 lets businesses derive more value from their past, present and future data center investments by effectively eliminating traditional silos to enable application-centric cloud and data center management,” said Torsten Volk, vice president of product management at ASG Software Solutions. “With a single tool for both legacy and modern environments companies can now truly bridge the gap between the corporate data center and the tools their employees use every day.”

The tool provides unified management capabilities for disparate IT resources, from cloud software services like Office 365, Dropbox or Salesforce to cloud infrastructure from the likes of Amazon Web Services to in-house virtualized environments by VMware, Citrix or Microsoft. It is compatible with open source cloud technologies, such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Cloud Foundry.

Pascal Vitoux, ASG CTO, said a companies’ resource consumption model, whether variable or fixed, is integral in choosing which environment is best from a cost perspective. “Our platform allows enterprises to do what is most advantageous to them. It allows them to build internally as well as consume resources in the public cloud.”

ASG offers a two-week cloud assessment program, where it goes deep into how a company is consuming services to help determine the right approach. It then helps construct a private catalog offering inside the enterprise where employees can consume services without necessarily knowing whether it’s internal or in the cloud.

“For us, it’s more a mixture of both cloud and on-prem based on what makes more sense,” said Vitoux. “We help end provisioning in a silo.”