Micro Focus Announces SMAX 2019.05, Latest Release of Industry's Only Modern Cloud-Native Intelligent Service Desk and Asset Management Solution

SANTA CLARA, CA – Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO; NYSE: MFGP) today announced the general availability of Service Management Automation X (SMAX) 2019.05. SMAX is the first 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).

For more information on the release of Service Management Automation X 2019.05, visit our blog post here.

About Micro Focus
Micro Focus helps organisations run and transform their business through four core areas of digital transformation: Enterprise DevOps, Hybrid IT Management, Predictive Analytics and Security, Risk & Governance. Driven by customer-centric innovation, our software provides the critical tools they need to build, operate, secure, and analyse the enterprise. By design, these tools bridge the gap between existing and emerging technologies—enabling faster innovation, with less risk, in the race to digital transformation.