New Name, Cloud Vision From CA Technologies

CA Inc. (CA) kicked off CA World 2010 this week in Las Vegas with a flurry of press releases and a name change.  CA Technologies unveiled its new name and ca.com web site during the opening day of the conference.

Still in his first year as CEO, William McCracken is off to quite a start. CA has forged into the cloud computing arena during the first half of 2010, acquiring 3Tera in February and Nimsoft in March.  In 2009 they acquired Cassatt and NetQoS.

'Cloud-Connected' Management
The CA Technologies Cloud Management Strategy was unveiled Monday as an ambitious plan to help customers  leverage the business value of cloud computing. The company unveiled a robust CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite that will address the emerging challenges presented by the cloud.

The CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite is composed of four products: CA Cloud Insight, CA Cloud Compose, CA Cloud Optimize and CA Cloud Orchestrate.  “CA Technologies is pioneering the delivery of IT management solutions under a SaaS model that enables customers to quickly shop for, acquire and deploy the tools they need to support their increasingly complex, dynamic and virtualized supply chains,” said Chris O'Malley, executive vice president of the Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line at CA Technologies.  The new suite will build upon technology acquired from 3Tera, Oblicore and Cassatt.

Collaboration With Cisco
CA Technologies and Cisco (CSCO) announced an expanded relationship, with a focus on collaborative technology integration. A new CA Service Assurance and other Service Automation Solutions will manage the Cisco Unified Computing System natively and provide unified management capabilities to help customers see and control the platform infrastructure and application stack.

"The Cisco Unified Computing System exemplifies systems designed for virtualization," said Peter Christy, a Principal of Internet Research Group. "CA Technologies’ platform-agnostic view of systems management fits perfectly with virtualized servers capable of concurrently running applications on many different OS platforms."

New products from Nimsoft
CA business unit Nimsoft announced several significant enterprise and service provider customer wins and the introduction of several new products. Nimsoft On Demand is a new Software as a Service Unified Monitoring solution delivering the capabilities and benefits of IT monitoring as an on-demand solution.  Additional products released included Unified Monitoring Portal, Power Monitor, and RCA and Topology Manager.  Nimsoft also recorded 26 new customer wins in recent months from companies like Sur La Table and Best Western Hotels.

Cloud Commons was announced at CA World as a collaborative community and website for IT professionals seeking insights into how to best use cloud computing to improve how IT supports business objectives.   While CA sponsors the site, foundational members include TM Forum, Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and Insight Investments. Features of the site include a Service Measurement Index, a marketplace of cloud computing service offerings, forums, and articles from industry analysts and subject matter experts as well as blog feeds and white papers.  The CloudSensor feature provides a snapshot view of the current performance status of public services.

CA World 2010 continues through May 20th.