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ASG focuses on providing IT software solutions that drive IT automation and efficiency for global enterprises, spanning mainframe, distributed and cloud environments. These solutions include several products that require superior software recognition to provide key functionality and reporting capabilities to IT and business stakeholders. Through integration of the Apptria Software Catalog, ASG's ASG-DDM, ASG-TrackBird, and ASG-ITASM can collect raw application data for software residing across its customers' environments, normalize the discovered data into recognized application titles, and make use of that information. As a result, ASG's customers will benefit from improved abilities to track and manage the software asset lifecycle, minimize license compliance risk and software overspending, and obtain an accurate view of business dependency on installed software.

A widely-recognized shortfall of many IT management tools is the inability to comprehensively and accurately identify software installed across the corporate network—an exceedingly complex process that requires cleansing, classifying, and normalizing application data discovered on desktops and servers into a taxonomy that can be correlated with licensable application titles and other important software information. The Apptria Software Catalog allows raw data discovered on desktops and servers to be mapped to corresponding, fully-normalized software titles, versions, editions, and manufacturers, so that end users can take advantage of product functionality and reporting that rely on this critical information.

Ian Rowlands, senior director of product management at ASG, said, "We are excited to bring world-class software recognition capabilities to our customers through this strategic partnership with Apptria Technologies. It is of prime importance to us that our customers in both mainframe and distributed environments have confidence in our products. Integration with the Apptria Software Catalog provides our customers with one solution for complete network inventory for packaged and custom applications, and represents a major development in our commitment to not only meet, but in fact exceed our customers' expectations."

The Apptria Software Catalog contains over 15 years of data from thousands of software publishers. It continues to grow daily through a "crowd-sourced" model comprised of an extensive network of partners, end users, and independent software vendors, ensuring the catalog remains perpetually up-to-date and relevant within ever-changing corporate and public-sector environments. With a global footprint of over 21 million desktops and a rapidly growing ecosystem of OEM partners, the Apptria Software Catalog has become the "gold standard" for software recognition.

According to Kris Barker, co-founder of Apptria Technologies, "ASG thoroughly understands the role high-quality application recognition plays in delivering best-of-breed technology to its diverse range of enterprise customers. The company's leadership is relentless in their pursuit to provide the most advanced and comprehensive asset management capabilities to their customers, and we are thrilled they chose the Apptria Catalog to help them achieve this goal."

About ASG | www.asg.com

A recognized innovator in enterprise IT and business software solutions, ASG Software Solutions has been optimizing 85 percent of the world’s most complex IT organizations for over 25 years. We create and deploy unique software solutions that reduce cost, mitigate risk and improve service delivery throughout the IT lifecycle. ASG’s comprehensive solutions help you solve today’s challenges, such as cloud computing and big data, while driving your business forward by providing insight and control across cloud, distributed and mainframe environments.

About Apptria Technologies | www.apptria.com

Apptria Technologies was founded in 2011 by several executives of Express Metrix, an industry leader in developing IT and software asset management solutions.  The Apptria Software Catalog™ (formerly the Express Software Identification Database [ESID]®), powers the application recognition within Express Metrix's flagship product, Express Software Manager.  Apptria Technologies' singular focus is to deliver reliable and trustworthy software recognition capabilities to its partners in order to increase the value and utility of their own technology offerings to customers. 

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By integrating licensing data into its software catalog, Apptria Technologies will enable its OEM partners to associate product use rights such as upgrade rights, downgrade rights, and license types with applications found on their customers' corporate workstations and servers.

Companies worldwide struggle to track and manage software licenses in part due to the lack of a standard methodology that would allow application information discovered on corporate desktops to be reliably correlated with software titles and entitlement data. This challenge has gained significant visibility in the last few years as increasingly aggressive software vendors seek to shore up flagging revenue streams by auditing their customers and demanding full compliance with license agreements.

The Apptria Software Catalog addresses such challenges by providing the data necessary to match application information discovered on desktops and servers with the correct software titles, versions, and editions in an automated fashion—a necessary, yet exceedingly complex first step in understanding what licensed software is installed across the enterprise, and where license deficits or overages exist. The addition of licensing data will help Apptria's OEM partners take the process one step further to determine what product use rights are permitted for applications deployed in their customers' environments.

Kris Barker, Co-founder of Apptria Technologies, commented, "We are excited to offer ISVs additional premium content that allows them to transform discovered application data into critical license intelligence for their end users. For our partners' customers, this will mean a significant improvement in their abilities to evaluate their license positions and minimize compliance risk. For Apptria partners, it provides an unprecedented opportunity to increase the value of their offerings and further differentiate their products from competitive solutions in the asset management marketplace."

With a global footprint of over 21 million desktops, the Apptria Software Catalog has rapidly become the "gold standard" for software recognition. Maintained by a dedicated team of researchers, the database grows daily through contributions from its extensive network of end users, as well as data provided by software publishers. By using this "crowd-sourced" approach, Apptria Technologies ensures its OEM partners' software recognition capabilities remain continuously up-to-date and relevant within their customers' complex and changing desktop/server environments.

To learn more about Apptria Technologies' OEM program, visit www.apptria.com or call 1.888.7042.

About Apptria Technologies | www.apptria.com

Apptria Technologies was founded in 2011 by several executives of Express Metrix, an industry leader in developing IT and software asset management solutions.  The Apptria Software Catalog™ (formerly the Express Software Identification Database [ESID]®), powers the application recognition within Express Metrix's flagship product, Express Software Manager.  Apptria Technologies' singular focus is to deliver reliable and trustworthy software recognition capabilities to its partners in order to increase the value and utility of their own technology offerings to customers. 

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Miradore is focused on serving Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to whom organizations outsource the management of their IT infrastructure. With Miradore, MSPs have a single dashboard view and remote access to their customers' network environments. Controlling multi-customer IT infrastructure via a single console , significantly increases operational efficiency. The all-in-one solution enables hardware and software asset management, configuration management, OS deployment and software distribution, and other critical IT functions such as back-up, monitoring and power management.

The integration of Apptria Technologies' extensive software catalog into the Miradore IT management solution brings MSPs a methodology for translating application information discovered on corporate desktops and servers into software titles that properly represent licensed application versions and editions. This software recognition process delivers data that accurately reflect an organization's application inventory and license position-and further, normalizes the data so it can be tied to other IT functions such as configuration management and software deployment.

Thanks to the fully integrated Apptria Software Catalog, MSPs using Miradore enjoy automated reconciliation of discovered application data with licensed software titles, freeing up resources from the previously manual task to other core IT initiatives on behalf of their customers.

According to Kristian Järnefelt, Miradore CEO, "We are thrilled by the extended capabilities we gain through the partnership with Apptria Technologies as it brings our Software Asset Management capability to the same level as some well established best-of-breed tools. This is a significant milestone in our strategy to offer the most comprehensive Software-as-a-Service based IT management suite in the market. By outsourcing the development and maintenance of the software catalog to Apptria rather than doing the work ourselves, we can provide these capabilities to our MSP customers at low cost and focus our own technical resources on strategic business priorities."

With a global footprint of over 21 million desktops, the Apptria Software Catalog has rapidly become the "gold standard" for software recognition. Maintained by a dedicated team of researchers, the database grows daily through contributions from its extensive network of partners and end users, as well as data provided by software publishers. By taking advantage of this crowdsourced model, Miradore can ensure its MSP customers' software recognition capabilities remain continuously up-to-date and relevant within their customers' ever-changing desktop environments.

Kris Barker, co-founder of Apptria Technologies, commented, "Miradore is a genuine innovator and strategic leader in the global IT device lifecycle management market, and recognizes the growing significance of Software Asset Management discipline among IT service providers. We are pleased that Miradore chose the Apptria Software Catalog to elevate its software recognition and Software Asset Management capabilities. Through this partnership and others, we are able to invest in further development of our software catalog and ensure we continue to meet our OEM partners' evolving needs."

About Apptria Technologies | www.apptria.com

Apptria Technologies was founded in 2011 by several executives of Express Metrix, an industry leader in developing IT and software asset management solutions.  The Apptria Software Catalog™ (formerly the Express Software Identification Database [ESID]®), powers the application recognition within Express Metrix's flagship product, Express Software Manager.  Apptria Technologies' singular focus is to deliver reliable and trustworthy software recognition capabilities to its partners in order to increase the value and utility of their own technology offerings to customers. 

About Miradore

Miradore enables the efficient management of diverse IT environments. Miradore provides IT organizations with a single dashboard view and remote access to a wide range of end user devices, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X workstations, Apple iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Phone, smart phones and tablets, and retail point-of-sale terminals. With the cloud-based Miradore software, managed service providers are able to build unified and highly automated service delivery processes to efficiently manage their customers' IT environments. Miradore supports the entire IT lifecycle, including purchasing, installation, maintenance, replacement, and retiring devices - eliminating a large share of manual IT management work. Miradore, a Red Herring Europe Top 100 winner in 2012, is headquartered in Finland. Read more at www.miradore.com.

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In addition to Specialist Software Services, the Apptria Software Catalog has been licensed by some of the world's top asset management vendors including Numara Software, IBM, LANDesk, BMC, New Boundary Technologies, and Amando Software. Through its growing network of OEM partners, the catalog enables accurate identification of software for over 15 million corporate and public sector PCs worldwide.

Growing Industry Awareness Surrounding Challenges of Software Recognition

Many asset management ISVs and managed services providers (MSPs) struggle to provide adequate software recognition capabilities to their end users, turning what is often assumed to be a fairly straightforward task of identifying what resides on desktops into a costly, burdensome procedure. The fundamental challenge stems from the lack of a standardized software identification methodology that can produce a predictable, consistent, and accurate means of correlating what's discovered on desktops with licensable application titles. The end result for end user organizations is a compromised ability to manage licensing risk and escalating software costs. For solution providers, it means dissatisfied customers, lost revenue, increased support costs, and rising development costs associated with attempts to address the problem.

"IT service providers, in an attempt to differentiate themselves, have been adding software license management services to their portfolios at a rate we've never before seen," said Kris Barker, Apptria Technologies' co-founder. "However, many underestimate the difficulty and complexity of obtaining accurate software data that serves as the foundation for this discipline. Specialist Software Services recognizes the important relationship between quality software identification and its ability to deliver first-rate license management services to its customers. We look forward to helping them achieve this goal."

The Apptria Software Catalog

The Apptria Software Catalog is the world's most widely utilized database of application titles and related software attributes, enabling reliable identification of programs installed and used across corporate networks—a capability vital for effectively managing software licenses. By integrating the Apptria Software Catalog into their own products and services, solution providers can take critical steps toward meeting and exceeding their customers' expectations for reliable asset management capabilities and reporting. With ten years of domain expertise and a singular organizational focus, Apptria Technologies delivers a proven software identification solution for partners that aren't equipped to develop one of similar caliber themselves.

The database is expanded and maintained by a dedicated team of researchers using data "crowd-sourced" from its growing network of OEM partners and end users, as well as provided directly from software publishers. As such, Apptria Technologies enjoys economies of scale that allow it to deliver its software catalog to its partners at a low cost that's exceedingly difficult to replicate.

According to Barker, “When ISVs and other solution providers perform their due diligence, they find this outsourced model very attractive; it's simply cost-prohibitive to build and maintain such recognition technology themselves, and it results in diversion of valuable resources away from their core competencies and strategic priorities."

Jason Allaway, CEO of Specialist Software Services, commented, "Our license management services represent a strategic value-add to our entire portfolio of offerings. It is far too important not only to our own success, but also to that of our customers, to have utmost confidence in the data used to drive critical license intelligence. We are very happy to partner with Apptria Technologies to provide the software recognition capabilities needed to accomplish this."

To learn more about options for licensing the Apptria Software Catalog, visit www.apptria.com or call 1.888.589.7042. 

About Apptria Technologies | www.apptria.com

Apptria Technologies was founded in 2011 by several executives of Express Metrix, an industry leader in developing IT and software asset management solutions.  The Apptria Software Catalog™ (formerly the Express Software Identification Database [ESID]®), powers the application recognition within Express Metrix's flagship product, Express Software Manager.  Apptria Technologies' singular focus is to deliver reliable and trustworthy software recognition capabilities to its partners in order to increase the value and utility of their own technology offerings to customers. 

About Specialist Software Services

Specialist Software Services is one of the new breed of Technology Service Providers who both develop and provide genuine business intelligence based on auditable metrics to enable Enterprise clients to understand and plan their asset estate. SSS ensures that their clients are compliant with the licence requirements of their technology providers and also adherence to government legislation. This enables enterprise clients to right size their licence and services position and plan their IT strategy and evolution in an efficient and economical way going forward.

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The Apptria Software Catalog™, developed over the past 15 years by software asset management leader Express Metrix, is now the core product offering of Apptria Technologies.  The catalog is the industry's most extensive database of commercial applications, enabling accurate identification of software installed and used across corporate networks—a capability vital for effectively managing software licenses, and performing countless other critical desktop management functions. 

The Apptria Software Catalog has been licensed by some of the world's top asset management vendors including IBM, New Boundary Technologies, Numara Software, BMC, Amando Software, FAST Ltd., and LANDesk.  Through its expanding network of OEM partners, the Apptria Software Catalog provides application recognition capabilities for over 15 million corporate and public sector PCs across the globe.  It is the same database that powers the software identification within Express Metrix’s own award-winning asset management solution, Express Software Manager®.

An Industry-Wide Software Recognition Problem

A widely-recognized shortfall of many software asset management tools is that they utilize data found within file headers and/or registry entries to perform the complex task of identifying software residing on desktops and servers.  While this “raw” application data provides important clues that aid in software recognition, it is virtually impossible to obtain a reliable view of installed software without cleansing, classifying, and normalizing that data into a taxonomy that is correlated with actual application titles, versions, and manufacturers.

A recently-issued international standard (ISO/IEC 19770-2:2009) aims to improve software recognition by including an XML-based file, or “tag,” as a part of a software product’s installation that provides authoritative identification information.  However, the standard has been slow to gain traction among software publishers and has only been implemented within a handful of software products.  This has left technology providers serving the asset management market with little choice but to invest heavily in recognition and normalization methodologies, or rely on more traditional—and far less reliable—identification techniques.

“IT departments are struggling to track and manage software, and they expect asset management tools to provide accurate, comprehensive, and trustworthy software recognition,” said Kris Barker, Apptria Technologies co-founder.  "Given the growing interest in our software catalog among ISVs and other solution providers, we realized it would be beneficial not only to ourselves, but also to those who license the database, to create an entity that's exclusively devoted to the OEM side of our business.  The new venture will focus exclusively on ensuring the present and future success of our partners, and Express Metrix will remain committed to serving its end user customers," said Barker.

The Apptria Software Catalog

The Apptria Software Catalog has proven to be a highly valued, yet cost-effective solution to this problem, as evidenced by the many OEM partners utilizing it today.  Maintained by a dedicated team of researchers, the database grows daily through contributions from its extensive network of end users, as well as data provided by software publishers. 

According to Barker, “Too many technology providers struggle with this aspect of their solutions, primarily because it requires a significant financial commitment and considerable domain expertise to develop and deliver recognition methodology that remains relevant within rapidly changing desktop and server environments.  It's simply cost-prohibitive for those who aren't uniquely structured and qualified to do so.  Apptria Technologies offers a simple outsourcing model; we do the heavy lifting so our partners can focus their development efforts on more strategic areas of their businesses." 

Apptria Technologies plans to continue evolving the software catalog, as well as related technologies, to augment its value as a strategic asset to the industry and to those partners that utilize it. 

To learn more about options for licensing the Apptria Software Catalog, visit www.apptria.com or call 1.888.589.7042. 

About Apptria Technologies | www.apptria.com

Apptria Technologies was founded in 2011 by several executives of Express Metrix, an industry leader in developing IT and software asset management solutions.  The Apptria Software Catalog™ (formerly the Express Software Identification Database [ESID]®), powers the application recognition within Express Metrix's flagship product, Express Software Manager.  Apptria Technologies' singular focus is to deliver reliable and trustworthy software recognition capabilities to its partners in order to increase the value and utility of their own technology offerings to customers. 

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