ASG Reinvents Mobius Content Services with Integral BPM, RPA and More

ASG EVOLVE 19 — Digital automation platform vendor ASG Technologies has unveiled ASG-Zenith — a new application that brings together business process automation (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), and no-code, low-code application building processes together with the company’s existing Mobius content repository.

Created as a digital automation platform for customers that require more integrated access, storage, organization, security and regulatory compliance capabilities for their digital content, ASG-Zenith is built around the company’s existing Mobius repository, David Downing, the company’s executive vice president of product marketing and product management, told Channel Futures here at ASG’s Evolve 19 conference in Dallas.

ASG’s David Downing

“ASG-Zenith now takes Mobius and adds four other parts,” including the low-code, no-code ASG-Studio application building environment, BPM, RPA and presentation services, said Downing.

Customers and partners have been asking for these integrations so they can better control digital content while providing the extra capabilities that can make the process much easier for businesses, he said.

Today, if companies modify their content holdings in one place, those changes aren’t automatically made in other places, which dramatically complicates content storage for users, said Downing.

“So, we wanted to put it all together with drag and drop business components for customers,” he said. “It can now be modeled before putting it into a runtime environment” to ensure things work as needed.

The process owner, or the person inside a company who needs to do this, can now do it on their own, without having to wait for IT to build them a desired app, said Downing.

“Right now, process owners have a backlog of applications that they want IT to look at or develop for them,” he said.

By allowing process owners to create the needed apps with low-code or no-code tools, IT staffers are freed up to take on more important business tasks while process owners gain new capabilities to take on and resolve simple business needs, he said.

And because the Mobius content repository is tied into BPM within ASG-Zenith, regulatory compliance is now integrated more directly with a company’s unstructured digital content, making it easier to manage and protect, he said.

“You want to go faster with the data you are using, but you don’t want to violate any compliance regulations,” said Downing. “Now it can be one process.”

ASG’s Mobius software can run on premises, in the cloud or using a hybrid model. Mobius runs on top of a customer’s storage infrastructure. ASG-Zenith is available initially as a SaaS-based service but will be available in hybrid and on prem versions in the future.

James Kobielus, lead analyst for SiliconANGLE Media’s Wikibon team, told Channel Futures that the new ASG-Zenith product integrates with the vendor’s core content management and data lineage offerings and will appeal to existing customers that are addressing more complex process automation challenges such as RPA. The new product will help its global system integrator and outsourcer partners serve their customers by giving them the tools to tailor custom and verticalized for customers’ process automation initiatives, he said.

But to keep the momentum rolling, the company will have to rapidly deliver the ability to support deployments of ASG-Zenith across public cloud and on-premises environments, given that many enterprises are moving toward hybrid and multicloud computing environments, he said.

The company also needs to expedite the launch of …

… a library of reusable artificial intelligence services in Zenith, which will be critical if ASG hopes to compete with Automation Anywhere, UIPath, and others in the burgeoning RPA market, said Kobielus.

“Solution vendors are shifting their solution portfolios toward delivery of packaged process applications that embed pretrained AI models to deliver fast industry or task-specific business outcomes,” said Kobielus. “For their part, low-code development tools are evolving toward a focus on building and orchestrating AI microservices for embedding in distributed application environments, especially in mobility, robotics, sensor networks and other edge scenarios.”

451 Research’s Paige Bartley

Another analyst, Paige Bartley of 451 Research, said that ASG’s new Mobius-based product will help channel partners better serve their customers who are seeking help with their digital content challenges.

“In introducing ASG-Zenith, ASG Technologies is using its established capabilities in data intelligence and content management to not only help organizations get the most out of their information, but to operationalize and automate the processes that help organizations successfully scale while staying in compliance with evolving data regulations,” she said. “By providing contextual user experiences for a spectrum of enterprise personas, ASG Technologies helps facilitate the increasingly complex and interdisciplinary workflows that are required for successful enterprise-wide insight initiatives.”