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CA Inc: Part 1Nov 17, 2008 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) -- John Swainson, President and CEO of CA, Inc. November 16, 2008, 6:00 PM PT The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, Las Vegas, NV Introduction Good evening. And welcome to CA World. Every 18 months we hold this important event for our most valuable customers. It's an opportunity for us to share with you what's new in our thinking and in our product portfolio. It's also an opportunity for us to spend time with you and talk about how we can work together now and in the future. We know you're busy. So we truly appreciate the effort and commitment you've made to be here. We are coming together at an historic time - a time of unprecedented turmoil in global markets...a time of great economic uncertainty. As business people, we are all determined to ensure the continued viability of our firms. We are focused on making the right decisions today, to prepare for better days ahead. When the inevitable economic recovery takes hold, we all want to be better positioned to take advantage of new opportunities. To do that, we have to make the right investments. Organizations have to invest in technology that improves efficiency, mitigates risk and drives business growth. At CA our mission is to help you derive greater value from your technology investments and we are committed to working with you to help you achieve your goals. And that's what I want to talk to you about tonight. First, why did I begin such a serious discussion with a foray into Second Life? Because it's clear to me that wherever you go in this world - or in the virtual world - you end up grappling with some familiar realities - like tough competitors and even tougher economic times...and IT complexity, which is the monster CA can help you wrestle with. I describe our ongoing battle against complexity every time we get together here at CA World, because it is the fundamental issue facing our industry and the leading obstacle that I see holding back our customers as they seek to get better bigger payback from IT. Tomorrow Jack Welch is going to join us on stage to share his wisdom of managing through change, and when I asked him what he used to say to his CIO at GE, his answer was immediate and simple: "more information, less cost." This is all about getting more information to run our businesses, and lowering the overall cost of doing business. The problem is that complexity means that this simple equation doesn't always work - without doing something to automate the management of IT to slay the complexity dragon. This problem is not going to go away. In fact it intensifies every year, because the IT industry continues to promote new innovations that promise tremendous business benefits. Innovations that in turn are layered into already-complex IT environments. This year the buzz is about virtualization - hence my adventure in Second Life to look for answers. While Second Life might be relatively unfamiliar territory to people of my generation, we know that virtualization - as opposed to virtual reality - is nothing new. We've had virtualization on the mainframe for over 40 years. But the discussion about virtualization today is much broader and includes servers, storage, networks, applications, and desktops. Virtualization promises myriad benefits - from reduced costs, improved service quality and increased agility to a smaller carbon footprint and reduced business risk - all acute concerns for businesses today. With a sound virtualization strategy and effective virtualization management, an organization should be able to transform IT management and provide dramatic business benefits - a compelling attraction in today's challenging economic conditions. The Complexity Challenge I'll talk in greater detail about virtualization and what CA is doing in this space in a few minutes. But first, let me put virtualization in context. As I've suggested, like other innovations that have the potential to deliver substantial business value, virtualization is accompanied by an equally substantial challenge, because it can add an additional layer of complexity to an already complex IT environment. To make matters worse, nothing about the IT environment is static. The advance of technology is inexorable - innovation is the constant. It is somewhat remarkable that we have been able to keep all this stuff running as well as it has for so long, but I believe that those days are coming to an end. We have identified six disruptive technologies that are going to change enterprise computing for ever, and will require a completely different approach to the management of those environments. These six technologies are: * First, Virtualization * Second, Faster and more ubiquitous converged networks; * Third, Service Oriented Architecture or SOA; * Fourth, Social Networking inside the enterprise; * Fifth, Cloud Computing; and * Sixth and finally, An explosion of networked devices, from phones to sensors. And of course, there will continue to be all the "run-of-the-mill" technology advances like IPV6 and faster, cheaper PCs and a myriad of others. These six technologies will change the nature of Enterprise IT for ever, and simply cannot be managed in the conventional ways. Imagine trying to manage thousands of virtual servers, running inside and outside your enterprise, with new instances being dynamically created and destroyed all the time, and still trying to provide a consistent level of service and a high level of security. Without a new approach to automating the IT environment, the complexity will make it impossible. Networks continue to expand to include remote and mobile devices of all types and additional applications - increasingly delivered as Web Services. With every addition to the enterprise, management and governance issues multiply - as do security vulnerabilities. And while all of this is going on, nothing in your IT environment is going away. The new devices, applications and platforms come on line right alongside the old stuff. At the same time, the demands on IT continue to escalate. You require even greater service levels, capacity and functionality to meet the needs of your business. So we find ourselves in a double bind that has become all too familiar: The IT environment grows more complex as the demands on IT escalate. Every one of these technology innovations represents a new challenge for governance, management and security, which continue to be the requisite elements for guaranteeing services levels and ensuring that IT investments are optimized. The Challenge for the CIO: Improving IT Economics Now take all those issues and consider them in the context of today's business climate. Organizations around the world are striving to cut costs and become more efficient. Economic uncertainty has intensified the pressure to do more with less. At the same time, companies seek a competitive edge to ensure that they not only survive the current economic downturn, but emerge from it strong and thriving. Many companies look to IT to provide that competitive edge...which puts today's CIO is in an interesting position. As IT has become a key driver of business growth and profitability, the challenges CIOs face are more strategic and business-focused than ever before. As stewards of IT economics, CIOs are expected to meet the seemingly infinite influx of demands with limited resources and budget. They have to respond to changing market conditions. Asked to cut costs, they have to find ways to further increase business efficiencies. And they have to do it without compromising services - or leaving the company at a competitive disadvantage when economic times improve. In other words, they have to drive more economic value from IT. To do that, CIOs need to do four things: * First, you must integrate IT with the business. You do that by determining when and where to make technology investments to drive the business and its strategy. You can make that determination only when you are able to manage IT with an understanding of how your infrastructure, users, and resources relate to the services you're delivering. * Second, you want to run lean and reduce costs. You do that by standardizing functions, processes and shared-service capabilities, automating manual tasks and accelerating best practices across all areas of IT. * Third, you've got to manage Enterprise risk. That involves managing assets, ensuring service continuity, ensuring compliance, and reaching operational goals. * Fourth and finally, you want to become truly customer-centric. You do that by managing according to the needs and expectations of customers, not technology functions. Again, you must understand how technology supports business services. And you must be able to communicate this information to the business - in business terms. CA's Solution: EITM CA is focused on helping our customers automate the IT management process to maximize the value delivered by IT and take advantage of all the wonderful advances and innovations I've mentioned already: virtualization, SOA, IPv6 and so on. To CA, improving IT economics is about managing your people, investments and technology resources to deliver high-quality services to drive business growth and value. CA has a name for how we enable organizations to drive business value from IT: Enterprise IT Management or EITM. We introduced EITM in this building in November of 2005. From the beginning, EITM has always been fundamentally about Transforming the way the world manages IT. If you've been to CA World before you've heard me talk about it - because for the past three years we've been refining it and delivering on the vision with enhancements to our industry-leading solutions and new solutions that meet your evolving needs. With our heritage as the world's leading independent IT management software company, CA can help you be more responsive to business requirements, improve service, lower IT costs, manage business risk, ensure compliance; and better align IT investments with your business priorities. EITM helps you govern, manage and secure IT across the enterprise - across both the distributed and mainframe environments. And while we're here in Las Vegas, you'll have a chance to learn what CA is doing to make EITM real: CA's Governance software provides CIOs with the insight needed to inform investment decisions as you develop a strategic business plan for IT. CA's Management software helps organizations be more responsive to business needs, run lean and reduce costs, ensure the availability and performance of IT services, virtualize IT resources, and automate IT functions and processes. And CA's Identity and Access Management Security software helps protect enterprise assets, ensure service continuity, deliver sustainable regulatory compliance and manage risk. In short, CA helps businesses deal more efficiently with the day-to-day management of IT so that you can focus on your business and your customers. * For instance, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals is replacing the infrastructure management products from one of CA's competitors with CA eHealth and Spectrum to improve service availability and reduce management costs. * Atos Origin used CA Service Desk to consolidate its service desk operations, slashing support call costs by 80 percent and strengthening its ability to retain global clients. * Another customer, Acxiom, made the development of a comprehensive governance, risk and compliance program a priority this year. They specifically wanted to manage compliance against three critical industry regulations, and were looking for a single, easy-to-use solution to give them the necessary visibility and accountability toensure compliance with those regulations...and also internal performance objectives. They're deploying CA Governance, Risk and Compliance Manager, and after mapping their financial and IT controls to their compliance drivers, now have the dashboards they need to validate compliance. * Manpower used CA Clarity to provide them with the visibility and control over key IT processes and controls. Using Clarity, they were able to reduce its total IT spending by 10%, and reduce the complexity in their IT operations, resulting in improved project execution and faster delivery of new solutions. The improved performance cited by Manpower is important, because improving IT economics is about more than saving money - although saving money is an outstanding benefit. It's about getting more business value from IT. * That's what BT discovered when the company used CA Identity & Access Management products to not only save more than 15 million pounds, but also to improve customer services. * A final example: Alltel came to CA with a big issue: customer experience and application performance problems on their critical web-based customer-facing applications. Those problems were affecting customer satisfaction, which in turn were affecting revenue. With CA Wily Introscope and Customer Experience Manager, Alltel was able to monitor more than 85 million customer and reseller transactions in the first six months. That, in turn, enabled Alltel to establish meaningful Service Level Agreements. The results? A 400 percent improvement in successful transaction volume. The identification and resolution of a hidden code problem. And improved customer satisfaction and revenue. And these customers aren't alone. For instance, here at CA World, we're releasing results of an IDC white paper that quantifies the benefits, cost savings, and return on investment (ROI) with EITM.(1) The eight companies interviewed in the CA-sponsored white paper reported an average ROI of 433% over a three-year period and the companies experienced payback of their initial investment in less than one year. In tough economic times, these are the kind of investments that make sense for the business. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more detail in the report, which further demonstrates that working with CA, organizations around the world are better able to use their IT resources to drive productivity and efficiency - and reduce labor and cost. With CA's EITM, organizations can do more with less - and do it better. Innovation: SaaS, Virtualization and the Ongoing Complexity Challenge When we announced EITM three years ago, frankly it was a smaller thought than it is today. We conceived of EITM as an integration mechanism for CA's key products. Now EITM has evolved, because we see a need for integration on a much broader and deeper level than we'd originally envisioned. Let me show you what I mean with a couple of examples. One of the core ideas of EITM is simplification. Software as a service - or On Demand IT Management - provides simpler solutions with faster time to value. CA can provision Clarity on Demand for a customer in as little as a day. And with rapid implementation, our customers can be using the software within a week or two. For instance, Kellogg's wanted to use Clarity On Demand to project manage the development and implementation of a global strategic ERP platform across the 19 countries in which they manufacture their products and the more than 180 countries where they market them. We had Clarity up and running for Kellogg's in 10 days. The benefits of SaaS are compelling, especially in challenging economic times. With SaaS, customers can focus on using an application, rather than operating it. They share more of the risk of deployment with the provider. And there are no up-front capital costs. Accessing IT and business applications in the cloud is a natural extension of everything else that we do online and we believe that it is an effective tool for driving greater business value from IT for our customers. Clearly, SaaS will continue to be an attractive option long after current challenges recede. So we are committed to being the leader in On Demand IT Management. That's why we've formed a separate business unit for SaaS to bring many of our products to market as on-demand services Earlier today, we held a press conference to discuss CA's approach to SaaS and to announce three new On Demand offerings - CA Clarity Product & Portfolio Management, CA Governance Risk & Compliance Manager, and CA Instant Recovery. While you're here, I would encourage you to find out what we have in store for SaaS. It's new, it's exciting, and we are already seeing high demand for it. We are looking at many new offerings for next year. As I said, we see benefits for our customers in a number of waves of IT innovations, including virtualization. Think about what Virtualization technology promises to businesses today: The agility to respond to changing market conditions; the flexibility to allocate resources where they're needed most; and efficiencies - especially when you adopt a combined strategy of virtualization and automation. Three years ago, EITM was focused on the physical world. Now it embraces physical and virtual hybridized environments. It has to, because to date companies have primarily leveraged virtualization for server consolidation, which is only the tip of the iceberg. Even early adopters of virtualization have largely confined themselves to deploying virtualization on just a minority of their servers - on application environments that are less than mission critical. Organizations won't realize big benefits unless they adopt virtualization as an integral part of their service delivery environment. So what's holding them back? In a word, risk. Management risk: Customers are concerned about the lack of deep performance, change and configuration, and application management across the virtualized infrastructure, which could hinder ROI and service quality. Asset and license management risk: Customers are concerned about lack of control over Virtual Machines as assets. And software licensing based on - or bound to - physical hardware may be difficult to manage in virtualized server environments. CONTACT: Dan Kaferle, Press Contact, CA, Inc. Tel: +1 631 342 2111 e-mail: [email protected] M2 Communications Ltd disclaims all liability for information provided within M2 PressWIRE. Data supplied by named party/parties. Further information on M2 PressWIRE can be obtained at http://www.presswire.net on the world wide web. Inquiries to [email protected]. |