Rocket Software acquires ASG Technologies to boost infrastructure management tools

Rocket Software this week announced it intends to acquire ASG Technologies as part of an ongoing effort to expand the reach of its portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ASG Technologies is best known for providing a configuration management database (CMDB) that is widely employed in IBM environments. But in recent years, it has expanded its portfolio to include infrastructure management tools, as well as business process management (BPM) and content management software it gained by acquiring Mowbly in 2018 and the acquisition of Mobius Management Systems in 2007.

Rocket Software, which is privately held by Bain Capital, has historically focused on middleware and tools that are employed to modernize mainframe environments. With the acquisition of ASG Technologies, the company will expand the scope of its product offerings to include more infrastructure management tools and software further up the application stack, newly appointed Rocket Software president Milan Shetti told VentureBeat.

Rocket Software sees the acquisition of ASG Technologies as part of a larger strategy to expand its reach across the enterprise, Shetti noted.

Industry growth

The overall size of the mainframe market opportunity, however, continues to grow as the IT platform becomes more tightly integrated with distributed computing platforms running inside and outside of cloud computing environments, Shetti added.

In the months ahead, the company will continue looking to expand its portfolio through organic and inorganic acquisitions, Shetti noted. Over the course of its history, Rocket Software has made more than 45 acquisitions, including Zephyr, Shadow, Aldon, and D3. The acquisition of ASG Technologies will present opportunities across a soon-to-be expanded product portfolio, Shetti noted. “We will continue to be an acquisitive company,” he said.

Of course, there is no shortage of rival offerings for managing applications and IT infrastructure in what is becoming an extended enterprise computing environment that reaches from public clouds all the way to the network edge. At the same time, the management of data and the applications employed to create that data are becoming more disaggregated. As that trend continues, the need for more sophisticated tools that can manage what is evolving into multiple centers of data gravity will become more pressing. One of the areas Rocket Software will invest in is developing the machine learning models needed to automate the management of a wide range of IT management tasks, Shetti said.

The promise of AIOps

In effect, an arms race to build next-generation tools for managing enterprise IT environments — also known as AIOps — is now well underway. There is no consensus on how sustainable AIOps is, given the degree to which all IT management tools will employ machine and deep learning algorithms. But the next generation of IT management platforms will continuously learn about the IT environment as changes and updates are made. It’s not likely these tools will replace the need for IT administrators as IT environments continue to become more complex. However, the amount of time spent trying to discover the root cause of a specific IT issue should be sharply reduced.

In addition, those platforms will enable IT organizations to compensate for a current shortage of IT skills that limits the degree to which such environments can scale. In theory, an IT team should be able to leverage AI platforms to manage several orders of magnitude more workloads as IT becomes more automated.

It may be a while before the promise of AIOps is fully realized, but the future of IT management can already be seen in large enterprises. It’s just a question of how long it might take for those AI capabilities to be pervasively applied across all enterprises.

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2021/04/14/rocket-software-acquires-asg-technologies-to-boost-infrastructure-management-tools/