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CA's New Unified Service Model Empowers IT to Drive Business Growth and Innovation
[April 22, 2007]

CA's New Unified Service Model Empowers IT to Drive Business Growth and Innovation


LAS VEGAS --(Business Wire)-- CA (NYSE: CA) today announced the next step in the fulfillment of its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision with an innovative Unified Service Model and an accompanying set of Capability Solutions that empower IT to drive business growth and innovation and transform the way companies govern, manage and secure IT.



The overwhelming complexity of today's IT environments prevents many IT organizations from responding quickly to business requirements and aligning technology with corporate strategy. IT organizations continue to devote a large percentage of their time and limited resources just to support existing capabilities. According to Gartner, "On average $8 out of every $10 spent in IT is 'dead money'--not contributing directly to business change and growth" and "Some enterprises spend 90 percent of their IT budgets just to keep standing still." *

CA is directly addressing this critical issue by enabling organizations to better manage costs and risk, improve service levels, and align IT efforts with the goals of the business. This frees up the IT budget for strategic initiatives that drive business growth.


"To deliver maximum value to the business, IT organizations must overcome complexity and become internal providers of value-added services," said Al Nugent, executive vice president and CTO at CA. "By streamlining IT management, CA is enabling customers to adopt this new, more strategic approach to the delivery of services across the enterprise."

Insight into Costs, Risks and Business Impact

The Unified Service Model is maintained in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). CA CMDB is uniquely designed and pre-configured to support the Unified Service Model, which is enabled through automated mapping of relationships between IT services and infrastructure components that support those services. This mapping facilitates rapid resolution of issues and allows IT to prioritize actions based on the importance of those services to the business. User identities and entitlements are mapped to service-based policies and roles, ensuring that access to resources can be managed from a service perspective.

The Unified Service Model also enables creation and management of a Service Portfolio, which IT organizations can use to make more informed decisions about resource allocation, business risk and budget allocation. Because the Unified Service Model integrates many aspects of IT operations, CA Capability Solutions are uniquely able to integrate and automate the way customers govern, manage and secure IT.

"As long as IT operations remained siloed in terms of process and technology, IT organizations will be limited in their ability to adopt a truly service-centric approach to business enablement," said Tim Grieser, vice president, System Management Software Research, IDC. "By allowing disparate IT functions to all share the same service-centric view of infrastructure, events, and tasks, CA's Unified Service Model can help IT organizations overcome these obstacles and behave much more strategically."

Govern, Manage and Secure

By leveraging the Unified Service Model, CA Capability Solutions provide a holistic approach to simplifying and automating IT Governance, Business Service Management and Security Management.

CA IT Governance solutions enable customers to make smarter IT investment decisions to support business strategy. They also allow IT executives to engage more effectively with their business counterparts to manage demand by providing insight into the cost and quality of an end-to-end service, such as email or CRM--rather than being limited to the management of the infrastructure and labor components that support those services. With this service-centric insight, customers can make both IT and business units accountable for their actions in order to promote fiscally responsible behavior. CA IT Governance solutions include:

-- CA Project & Portfolio Management that supports alignment of IT spending decisions with business strategy by providing real-time views into investments, initiatives, and resources

-- CA IT Asset & Financial Management that helps manage assets through their life cycle and helps manage IT expenditures from budgeting through cost allocation

-- CA Information Governance that protects and manages information throughout its life cycle to ensure access and availability at the right time and by the right people

CA Business Service Management solutions enable customers to cost-efficiently deliver reliable, high-quality services through an automated, optimized IT infrastructure. In this way, the business can reap maximum value from its investments in people, systems, networks, storage, software, and other IT assets and ensure that the services it delivers are having the desired impact on the business. CA Business Service Management solutions include:

-- CA Service Level Management for establishing and monitoring adherence to service level agreements, as well as the definition and publication of enterprise IT service catalogs

-- CA Change & Configuration Management that provides a single process for managing change to applications and IT infrastructure

-- CA Incident & Problem Management that automates IT processes to consolidate, log, track, manage and escalate incidents and problems

-- CA Application Performance Management that optimizes the performance and availability of applications, portals and other enterprise services

-- CA Service Availability Management that integrates event and performance management across all domains: systems, network, storage, databases and applications

-- CA Network & Voice Management that provides integrated fault and performance management for multi-vendor, heterogeneous data, IP telephony and legacy voice networks

-- CA Dynamic & Virtual Systems Management that discovers, monitors and automates management of heterogeneous, virtual and clustered system environments

-- CA Workload Automation that dynamically automates workloads across multi-platform environments based on events

-- CA Database Management that helps reduce the total cost of database ownership by automating day-to-day operations and increasing overall service responsiveness

-- CA Recovery Management that protects business continuity by simplifying backup, replication, failover and data recovery operations

CA Security Management solutions protect assets and manage risks by enforcing policy-based controls, managing identities, and ensuring appropriate access. They enable customers to guard against the full range of threats--including malicious code, cyber-criminals, and unauthorized access of sensitive information by internal users--while making it easier to give users secure, auditable access to the IT resources they need to do their jobs. CA Security Management solutions include:

-- CA Identity and Access Management that automates the management of user identities throughout their life cycle to ensure that only properly authorized users access critical IT resources

-- CA Security Information Management that centralizes management of events and forensic analysis to optimize the security staff productivity and effectiveness

-- CA Threat Management that protects customers from spyware, viruses, worms, spam, and other threats.

"By providing us with Capability Solutions that integrate and automate IT management to simplify complexity, CA is enabling West Corporation to better leverage IT for business growth and innovation," said Jeff O'Hare, senior vice president of IT at West Corporation, a leading provider of outsourced communication solutions. "CA's solutions allow us to offer higher quality services to our customers while freeing up resources we have available for our strategic IT initiatives."

CA's integrated IT Governance, Business Service Management and Security Management solutions support the full range of technologies being used by organizations of all kinds today--including mainframes, client/server platforms, Web services, proprietary and open-source platforms, wired and wireless networks, and third-party development environments. They deliver the technology, services and education customers need to rapidly and cost-effectively achieve their business and technology goals.

* Gartner, Inc. "The 2006 Gartner Symposium Keynote: IT Must Think Differently, Act Differently and Be Different to Drive Business Growth," Mark Raskino, Daryl Plummer, Audrey Apfel, Richard Hunter, and Stephen Prentice, October 2006.

About CA

CA (NYSE: CA), one of the world's largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., and serves customers in more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com.

Copyright (C) 2007 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

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