Looking to help IT decision makers with the tools to get the
most out of the leading edge infrastructure today, CA put the focus on CA Cloud
360 this week at CA World. At the center of its cloud plans, CA’s Cloud 360 lets IT analyze service-level performance and
manage SLAs, survey and analyze their application portfolios, predict capacity
needs and simulate service virtualization and application behavior in various
production scenarios.
CA executives said that the technology updates to this and
other offerings will help it better jockey into position as a major cloud
player in the coming years and will help customers transition from just
managing IT to delivering business services.
“Everyone is scrambling to do more with less, to become more
agile and to find more cost-effective ways to support the business. The
result is a transformative moment that offers a tremendous opportunity for
competitive differentiation—as well as a huge strategic challenge,” David
Dobson, executive vice president and group executive of the Customer Solutions
Group at CA, said this week. The reality is that we’re all dealing with a huge
amount of IT complexity. You’re managing a large data center with
infrastructure from multiple vendors. You’re experimenting with
applications and infrastructure in the cloud. But whether you’re adopting a
private cloud, a public cloud, or a hybrid of these models, you’re going to
need to manage and secure a multi-vendor, multi-platform, cloud-enabled
environment.”
CA Cloud 360 can help organizations speed up the time and
testing it takes to develop new cloud environments. According to CA it makes it
possible to ramp up to new cloud infrastructure within three months.
Complementing the release, CA also announced two new
identity and access management (IAM) cloud solutions to its CA CloudMinder
family of IAM-as-a-Service. The new products will help organizations provision
and manage account access in the cloud as needs expand and contract. In addition to these new security offerings,
CA also announced updates to CA Automation Suite for Clouds and CA Application
Performance Management, adding improved management functions and support for
more platforms like CA AppLogic
platform, VCE vBlockTM Infrastructure Platforms, and Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM
LPAR, Oracle Solaris Zones and VMware View, as well as enhanced cloud
management in the former, and rolling out cloud application monitoring service
with end-to-end transaction visibility into cloud applications in the latter.
On top of these changes and adds, CA also tinkered with its
bread-and-butter mainframe solutions to more capably handle the demand for
service-oriented IT and better support cloud infrastructure. Improvements to its mainframe portfolio were
made to integrate cross-platform management for application performance and
process automation, giving users a better way to trace transactions through
distributed and mainframe environments, across virtualized and physical systems
within the firewall and into the cloud.
In addition to the product releases, CA also hopes to
improve the support it offers partners and customers through the release of the
new Cloud Commons Marketplace and Developer Studio. The marketplace offers
buyers and sellers a virtual space to compare, procure, manage, and sell
ongoing subscription-based cloud solutions, services and content. Meanwhile the
studio offers a way for developers to create cloud-ready IT applications for
both public and private cloud environments using the AppLogic platform.
Taken in aggregate, Peter Griffiths, executive vice
president for CA, said these releases reflect CA's mission to better equip IT
departments for a new era of business service delivery.
“IT has to deliver many more services that change much more
quickly—and they are turning out to be composite, cloud-spanning applications,”
he said. “This evolving hybrid enterprise of the future will include
devices, on-premise systems and data, external cloud services, and new
applications developed by the enterprise and deployed in the cloud. In this
future enterprise, IT organizations need to be equipped with a broad range of
solutions that help them deliver IT at the speed of business.”
Cloud Computing 
