CA Technologies made a big splash in the cloud market this
week with the launch of a spate of new updated products targeted to both
enterprise customers and service providers interested in building out their
public and private cloud offerings.
Instrumental to the offerings is an integrated but
free-flowing cloud system that avoids the kind of vendor lock-in forced by
'cloud stack' approaches by other vendors, CA executives say. This is
especially important for service providers looking for greater flexibility and
better bottom line impact from their infrastructure.
"Service providers are looking at the cloud as a huge
opportunity but also as a huge threat as they're trying to figure out what
niche they're going after," says Jay Fry, vice president of strategy for
CA's Cloud Management Customer Solutions Unit. "(They're wondering,) 'How
do I make a sustainable business? And what is the infrastructure of the
technology I need to have in place so I can offer these cloud services and do
it quickly?' And that's the choice we're trying to enable them with. We're
focused around how to help them quickly increase revenue and also maintain
margin."
The new offering most likely to attract service provider
attention is CA Automation Suite for Clouds 1.0, which gives service providers
the power to improve efficiency by automating and managing a range of
infrastructure products, including Cisco UCS, VCE Vblock infrastructure
platforms, NetApp, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and IBM
LPARs. . It supports end-user self-service and provides a catalog of
applications and services that can be accessed through a secure, online portal,
integrating that with on-demand provisioning, dynamic resource and workload
management, service metering and billing, and role-based security.
For partners selling to the enterprise, another highlight
among the new offerings is CA Virtual Placement Manager 1.0, which helps
organizations take on problems of VM stall and sprawl with its analytics
engine. At its core is its capacity
management capability, which offers solutions for optimal workload assignment,
predicting capacity needs, and addressing performance and response time risks
while also right-sizing new and existing virtual machines. Users can perform
these analyses with both existing and hypothetical infrastructure components.
Perhaps the heart of the slew of updates important to both
service providers and enterprises was the launch of the updated CA AppLogic
3.0. The turnkey cloud platform gives users the ability to define
infrastructure, provision, deploy and manage applications, as well as monitor
operations, using only a browser.
Available today, the new version of CA AppLogic offers an application-centric, fast and easy
approach for delivering infrastructure, tools, applications and virtual data
centers in the cloud. Service providers can use the CA AppLogic platform to add
new revenue-driving services—independent of hypervisor technology—with dramatic
speed, flexibility and choice. It can support multiple hypervisors on the same
grid, including VMware ESX and Xen, giving service providers the ability to
address more customers and architectures, and allows enterprises to protect
their investments in VMware.
“We have a long-standing relationship with CA Technologies
providing CA AppLogic software for our enterprise-class cloud computing
solutions including virtual private data centers (VPDCs) and on-demand cloud
services,” said Kevin Van Mondfrans, senior director of Cloud Services at
Layered Tech. “CA Technologies continues
to demonstrate its commitment to Layered Tech and our customers by ensuring
that CA AppLogic delivers the flexibility, scalability, protection and
ease-of-use needed to keep pace with our rapidly growing VPDC and cloud
services business.”
As an added bonus to service providers, CA also took the
wraps off a new CA Cloud Market Accelerator Program for Service Providers,
offering partners tools and resources for co-marketing, sales enablement and
collaboration.
"It's essentially a set of tools and go to market
planning that will help our partners work on both to targeting their business,
improving their revenues and building margin, doing it in a way where we're not
just throwing technology over the wall."
Cloud Computing 
