Asta Labs has released Asta Resources — a unique, new generation resource inventory solution. It enables managing information on resource configuration and processes of resource deployment and maintenance within diverse, in particular networking, environments of telecommunications networks, power grids, communications and transport infrastructures, and others. Information on both physical and logical resources can be managed – infrastructure sites and infrastructure connections, equipment and its hardware and software modules, logical connections, and much more. The information can have the rich multimedia form of photos, videos, documents, figures, floor plans, etc., and be presented using road and satellite maps and 3D visualisations. Asta Resources allows for resource management in a multi-party environment, when the resources are owned by different companies, which can describe their owned resources as planned or installed, designate as public or private, share them and lease, etc.

Asta Resources is an advanced and modern system but at the same time it is lightweight and simple. It is a mobile cloud computing system that supports a true SaaS model. A company can obtain its dedicated instance of Asta Resources in a matter of minutes with on-line registration of the company’s account, in real time activation of the company’s services in the cloud, and immediate, on-demand download of smartphone and tablet applications from the app store by the company’s employees. Implemented on Asta Architecture, Asta Resources is a highly scalable system that can be hosted in the Microsoft’s public Windows Azure cloud as well as in the company’s private cloud organised with Windows Server-based infrastructure.

Asta Resources realises the idea of the communitised business and operations support system. Its simple, intuitive and attractive smartphone and tablet applications, resembling social networks apps, are so much different than heavy, complex, overloaded applications of legacy, traditional resource inventory systems, which are installed on a limited numer of workstations and are only operated by a few highly skilled individuals. With simplification being one of primary system design objectives, Asta Resources provides for creating a large community of system users who can access resource-related information no matter who they are and where they are, using their everyday experience with instant messaging, uploading multimedia content or information tagging of social networks. In that way, Asta Resources promotes ubiquitous use of rich, multimedia resource-related information throughout all the divisions of the company, making the information more up-to-date, more consistent, and thus more valuable, allowing, in particular, for data crowdsourcing, etc.

Asta Resources is both flexible and future safe. Domain-specific models of resources that are downloaded at system deployment can then be customised and extended at system runtime — using object-oriented modelling concepts, system administrators can freely define new classes (kinds) of resources, like a new kind of equipment with specific functionality, and new resource types, i.e., specific types of resources of a given kind, like a new model of equipment of a given kind from a given manufacturer. Exploiting advanced capabilities and customisation features of the Asta Surveys technology arbitrary technical surveys can be defined to support resource management processes. And due to advanced workflow and workforce capabilities of Asta Platform those business processes can be tailored to the company’s profile, structure, maturity, and specific needs.