Skip to main content

Micro Focus Announces SMAX 2019.05

Micro Focus announced the general availability of Service Management Automation X (SMAX) 2019.05.

SMAX is an application suite for Enterprise Service Management and IT Service Management built on machine learning and analytics, powered by an embedded CMDB and Discovery to help drive down costs and speed up time to resolution. Built-in best practices are quickly and easily configured and extended in an entirely codeless way with the SMAX Studio enabling customers to achieve faster time to value. The scalable, multi-tenant cloud-native solution delivers significantly lower cost of ownership and enables customers to deploy on their choice of public or private cloud. SMAX is also available as-a-service by Micro Focus partners worldwide.

The 2019.05 release features the general availability of "Max," a customer-brandable smart virtual agent, that understands natural language and uses machine-learning to improve over time, and the general availability of codeless SMAX Studio Apps for Capacity Management and SecOps on the Micro Focus Marketplace that can easily be added to your SMAX deployment.

"SMAX was designed from the ground up to meet the challenges of modern IT organizations, enabling delivery and governance of services on demand while providing features that can engage users while driving down support and operational costs," said Tom Goguen, Micro Focus Chief Product Officer. "Its unique cloud-native architecture and codeless configuration for future proof upgrades ensures lower overall cost of ownership vs. legacy SaaS and on-premises based toolkits."

"What I appreciate the most about this SMAX release, is that it brings to market a new conversational virtual agent that does not need training, as it learns from the data itself," said Joseph Madden, President and CEO of Greenlight Group. "The Micro Focus commitment to customer-centered innovation and partners has allowed for us to be the first in the market to provide a service management solution that uses and supports managed Kubernetes as well, which will accelerate our time to market and increase our customers' productivity, resource efficiency, flexibility and automated operations."

With the latest version of SMAX, 2019.05, the following enhancements are now available:

- Enhanced smart virtual agent that uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to recognize end users' intentions and find the best matched intent predefined to provide either related answers or catalog offerings as responses. End users can chat with the virtual agent using the SMAX Service Portal to get their issues resolved faster and more accurately, with fewer tickets opened and savings on support costs.

- SMAX Studio which enables the development of custom processes and applications without writing code, now supports the importing, exporting and publishing of applications to the Micro Focus Marketplace. Customers and partners can now leverage and build reusable content that can easily be advanced through their DevOps pipeline and be shared across tenants and with the SMAX community.

- Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE) support enables Micro Focus customers and partners to deploy SMAX on Google Cloud using Google's native Kubernetes support to further reduce operational costs. SMAX can be deployed on-premise, AWS or Azure, and now on Google Cloud (GCP).

The Latest

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 19, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA explains the cause of the AWS outage in October ... 

The explosion of generative AI and machine learning capabilities has fundamentally changed the conversation around cloud migration. It's no longer just about modernization or cost savings — it's about being able to compete in a market where AI is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies that can't quickly spin up AI workloads, feed models with data at scale, or experiment with new capabilities are falling behind faster than ever before. But here's what I'm seeing: many organizations want to capitalize on AI, but they're stuck ...

On September 16, the world celebrated the 10th annual IT Pro Day, giving companies a chance to laud the professionals who serve as the backbone to almost every successful business across the globe. Despite the growing importance of their roles, many IT pros still work in the background and often go underappreciated ...

Micro Focus Announces SMAX 2019.05

Micro Focus announced the general availability of Service Management Automation X (SMAX) 2019.05.

SMAX is an application suite for Enterprise Service Management and IT Service Management built on machine learning and analytics, powered by an embedded CMDB and Discovery to help drive down costs and speed up time to resolution. Built-in best practices are quickly and easily configured and extended in an entirely codeless way with the SMAX Studio enabling customers to achieve faster time to value. The scalable, multi-tenant cloud-native solution delivers significantly lower cost of ownership and enables customers to deploy on their choice of public or private cloud. SMAX is also available as-a-service by Micro Focus partners worldwide.

The 2019.05 release features the general availability of "Max," a customer-brandable smart virtual agent, that understands natural language and uses machine-learning to improve over time, and the general availability of codeless SMAX Studio Apps for Capacity Management and SecOps on the Micro Focus Marketplace that can easily be added to your SMAX deployment.

"SMAX was designed from the ground up to meet the challenges of modern IT organizations, enabling delivery and governance of services on demand while providing features that can engage users while driving down support and operational costs," said Tom Goguen, Micro Focus Chief Product Officer. "Its unique cloud-native architecture and codeless configuration for future proof upgrades ensures lower overall cost of ownership vs. legacy SaaS and on-premises based toolkits."

"What I appreciate the most about this SMAX release, is that it brings to market a new conversational virtual agent that does not need training, as it learns from the data itself," said Joseph Madden, President and CEO of Greenlight Group. "The Micro Focus commitment to customer-centered innovation and partners has allowed for us to be the first in the market to provide a service management solution that uses and supports managed Kubernetes as well, which will accelerate our time to market and increase our customers' productivity, resource efficiency, flexibility and automated operations."

With the latest version of SMAX, 2019.05, the following enhancements are now available:

- Enhanced smart virtual agent that uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to recognize end users' intentions and find the best matched intent predefined to provide either related answers or catalog offerings as responses. End users can chat with the virtual agent using the SMAX Service Portal to get their issues resolved faster and more accurately, with fewer tickets opened and savings on support costs.

- SMAX Studio which enables the development of custom processes and applications without writing code, now supports the importing, exporting and publishing of applications to the Micro Focus Marketplace. Customers and partners can now leverage and build reusable content that can easily be advanced through their DevOps pipeline and be shared across tenants and with the SMAX community.

- Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine (GKE) support enables Micro Focus customers and partners to deploy SMAX on Google Cloud using Google's native Kubernetes support to further reduce operational costs. SMAX can be deployed on-premise, AWS or Azure, and now on Google Cloud (GCP).

The Latest

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 19, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA explains the cause of the AWS outage in October ... 

The explosion of generative AI and machine learning capabilities has fundamentally changed the conversation around cloud migration. It's no longer just about modernization or cost savings — it's about being able to compete in a market where AI is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies that can't quickly spin up AI workloads, feed models with data at scale, or experiment with new capabilities are falling behind faster than ever before. But here's what I'm seeing: many organizations want to capitalize on AI, but they're stuck ...

On September 16, the world celebrated the 10th annual IT Pro Day, giving companies a chance to laud the professionals who serve as the backbone to almost every successful business across the globe. Despite the growing importance of their roles, many IT pros still work in the background and often go underappreciated ...