In an exclusive interview with ComputerWire, the company’s founder, president and CEO Art Allen said that toward the end of September the company will offer a virtual repository capable of storing, presenting and optimizing management metadata drawn from its security, applications, operations, information, performance, and infrastructure management modules.

According to Allen, BSM is all about making the IT assets of the business available to both IT and business people. It enables different views of the IT assets for different users depending on their role within the organization, for example the CEO, CIO and CFO.

While further details of the imminent BSM product line-up are still sketchy, Allen said the virtual repository it is developing will also integrate with its Business Information Portal to enable BSM data to be shared, analyzed and published within and beyond an enterprise.

Allen said that the BSM software would help business and IT people to better make use of their IT assets, and help them to prioritize tasks. It helps business users to be less ‘techie’, he said. You won’t have to be a guru to use this – it will offer templates and other utilities, so users will have little bespoke crafting to do.

Allen said the BSM and Business Information Portal developments will also help to bring together all of the different management disciplines which ASG offers, from security management to infrastructure management. The company has made over 30 acquisitions since it was founded in 1986, as it has sought to broaden its portfolio of management tools.

ASG, which is headquartered in Naples, Florida, claims to have sales of about $180m per annum, 7,000 customer sites, and 18,000 software licenses. Allen said the company expects the BSM strategy to help it to more than quadruple revenue by 2005. It has about 100 separate products, which it hopes will be made more homogeneous thanks to the BSM strategy, and competes with the likes of BMC Software, Computer Associates, IBM’s Tivoli division, and HP’s OpenView line.

Source: Computerwire