Featured Articles
CA Technologies announced its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 35 percent by 2020, from a 2006 baseline, in its new Sustainability Report titled Moving Together.
The report highlights the company’s advances in sustainability over the past year, and profiles its commitment to people (employees and community), the planet and profit goals. The full report and summary can be downloaded here.
“We’ve made sustainability one of the core principles of the company, highly visible and encouraged throughout the enterprise,” said Cynthia Curtis, Chief Sustainability Officer, CA Technologies. “This is evidenced in our commitment to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which we intend to accomplish through a combination of increased use of renewable energy, efficiency gains in our facilities, and leveraging new and emerging technologies.”
Xtraction for CA Service Management will enable users gain real-time insight into all key aspects of IT services
IT management software and applications company CA Technologies has introduced a new self-service application, Xtraction for CA Service Management, which will enable non-technical users to create and design interactive IT performance dashboards and reports.
Xtraction for CA Service Management is a browser-based application with an interface for building charts, graphs, pivot tables and other graphical reporting elements using simple point-and-click tools.
CA Technologies has released the next generation of its energy and sustainability management software.
The latest version, CA ecoGovernance 3.0, includes several updates that are specifically pegged to customer feedback, according to the developer. They include:
• Real-time key performance indicators that can be used to link energy and resource metrics to business objectives
• Additional analytics capabilities, including the ability to normalize facility performance for weather factors and metrics related to business travel
• Templates for supply chain and building assessments
• More features for Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) management
• Support for Energy Star integration
• Mobile interfaces
One trend that has started to emerge that could bode both well and ill for the IT department is an extension to systems management tools that are designed to give end users more visibility into IT process management. A recent example of this trend is a new Xtraction for CA Service Management tool from CA Technologies that allows end users to create and design interactive IT performance dashboards and reports on their own.
The most positive thing about the increasing availability of such tools is they allow executives who have come to appreciate the value of IT to become more informed. The downside is they create a window in the IT environment that not only makes IT potentially more accountable, but it also shines a potential spotlight on every little hiccup regardless of the actual business impact of a particular event.
Allen Houpt, an advisor for S&PM solution marketing, concedes that not every IT organization is thrilled about the implications of business executives running their own IT reports, especially when not all of those executives are equally IT-savvy. At the same time, however, it’s a whole lot easier to sell a business executive on the need for upgrades and improvements when they are actively engaged in the IT process, especially if that process is clearly being well run.
Just in time for what will be a large number of required migrations, CA Technologies has updated its software for managing DB2 databases running on IBM z/OS mainframes.
"DB2 is a very rich environment, and is very specific about how you work with it from an application perspective," said Mark Combs, a CA distinguished senior vice president for mainframe operations. "With DB2 10, IBM introduced a lot of good new features, but it requires work" to upgrade a database to take advantage of them, he said.
CA has updated two of its software packages for managing DB2 on z/OS, namely CA Technologies Database Management Solutions for DB2 for z/OS, now at version 16, and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Management, now at version 2.5. Both packages have been updated to manage DB2 version 10, which IBM released in April.
CA Technologies in the News
