News at CA

CA wins up to $80 million on IRS appeal

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Revenue Service that the company says will result in a refund of up to $80 million.

The move lowers the company’s 2014 fiscal-year tax rate to 14 percent, down from 31 percent, increasing its first-quarter income to up to $185 million. CA also expects to receive a refund of $70 million to $80 million for the years 2005 to 2007.

The company’s stock rose 1.53 percent today, to $27.22 per share.

CA Lifts Full-Year Earnings View on Tax Resolution

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The software maker now expects adjusted profit to grow around 16% to 20% in the year ended March 2014, indicating a range of roughly $2.93 to $3.03 at recent exchange rates. Its previous outlook called for earnings to decline by 4% to 7%.

CA recently completed an Internal Revenue Service appeals process related to its tax returns for fiscal years 2005, 2006 and 2007. As a result, the company now projects a 2014 tax rate of around 14%, compared with its previously projected rate of 31%.

The company expects to post a benefit of $165 million to $185 million to its net income in the current quarter, as well as a cash refund of $70 million to $80 million by the end of the second quarter of the fiscal year.

CA earlier this week reported its fourth straight quarterly sales decline, warned of continuing weakness, and said it would cut 1,200 jobs.

Shares closed Thursday at $26.81 and were unchanged after hours. Through the close, the stock was up 22% since the start of the year.

LI companies on Fortune 500 list

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Fortune magazine yesterday released its annual list of the nation's largest public companies based on 2012 revenue, and CA Technologies is back on it after a two-year absence.

The Islandia-based computer software provider ranked 499th, with sales of $4.8 billion. It fell short of the cutoffs for the 2011 and 2012 lists. "It is a wonderful reflection of the hard work of our employees worldwide, and of our ability to translate that effort to helping our customers," said CA official Jennifer Hallahan.

CA's drop-off, combined with Arrow Electronics' 2011 decision to move its headquarters to a Denver suburb from Melville, left the Island with only two entries last year.

With Arrow's departure, the biggest local company, based on revenue, continues to be Henry Schein Inc. The Melville-based medical products distributor moved up seven spots to 296th, with sales of $8.9 billion last year.

"To climb more than 190 spots on the Fortune 500 list in less than a decade is a testament to our success in executing on our strategic plan," said chief executive Stanley M. Bergman. He also said the business hopes to top $10 billion in sales by
2015.

The other local entry was Cablevision Systems Corp., which placed 382nd, down 34 spots from last year. The Bethpage-based communications company, which owns Newsday, reported revenue of $6.7 billion in 2012.

A Cablevision official declined to comment yesterday. Company filings show its lower place on the Fortune list, year over year, was because of the June 2011 spinoff of AMC Networks from Cablevision. Both Cablevision and AMC are controlled by the Dolan family.

In the competition among states, New York again lagged behind California but tied with Texas. Fifty-two public companies on the list called the Empire State home, up two from last year. California had 54.

Discount retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville, Ark., with sales of $469.2 billion, unseated petroleum giant Exxon Mobil of Irving, Texas, with sales of $449.9 billion, as the country's largest company. The two have traded top honors several times over the past decade.

Focus on the Business Service, Not The ITIL Processes

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

During my recent travels throughout the world, I recently held a number of round table discussions on service management implementations, challenges and successes. Interestingly, many organizations that successfully implement incident, problem and change management start to run out of steam and then find it incrementally harder to move to the next level. In the round tables, we've been discussing the reasons for this and some of the successful practices that support effective execution of service management initiatives.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some the successes and failures based on these discussions. Today's post focuses on the importance of business services vs. ITIL processes.

Intermountain Looks to Heal the Business Divide

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

With rising health-care costs in the political spotlight in one form or another nearly every day, IT leaders in the health-care space are being asked to have a meaningful dialogue with business leaders in their industry about how to use IT to bring costs under control. One problem, of course, is that IT people and the business leadership don’t always speak the same language.

At Intermountain Healthcare, the IT organization has begun to transform the way the IT organization engages with the rest of the business. A long-time user of the CA Technologies’ Clarity IT financial management software, the health-care organization is now working with CA Technologies to develop a new version of the software, called CA Clarity Playbook, that will be specifically optimized for business and senior IT executives so they can keep track of IT spend on a project or strategic initiative basis.

We Have Huge Expectations from Our Converged Infrastructure Solutions: Stephen Miles

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Technologies formally announced its converged infrastructure solution a few months ago. What does this bring to the table for customers and what is the way forward for the converged platform in India?

Yes, CA Technologies did formally announce the availability of its next-generation infrastructure management product in India. We have about 20 years of experience and market leadership. The new solution has the spectrum to become infrastructure management version 1.0, with a natural evolution driving it, and the capability to devolve and be driven further as a purpose-built concept.

Casewise Signs OEM Agreement with CA Technologies

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

"Casewise Systems, a leading international provider of Enterprise Business Architecture, Business Process Analysis and Business Process Management software and solutions, today announced it has signed an OEM agreement with CA Technologies to provide a data-driven enterprise architecture solution that helps businesses visualize organizational interdependencies for better decision-making. Casewise Integrated Modeler, powered by CA ERwin®, gives organizations the ability to clearly see data in context, with linkages to core enterprise processes, technologies and applications.”

CA Technologies Reaffirms Mainframe Commitment

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The CA Technologies Mainframe strategy will help customers by sustaining investments in foundational technologies; collaborating closely with customers on product design to help CA Technologies develop products that meet customers’ most critical IT needs; and streamlining for savings and return on investment through the company’s Mainframe Software Rationalization Program (MSRP), which assesses customers’ portfolio needs and can help them to realize estimated savings of up to $1.4 million a year.

“Information technology is in the midst of a tremendous change cycle,” says Michael Madden, general manager for CA's mainframe division. “We have responded with a strategy that serves the evolving requirements of the data center, including cost-effectiveness, data security and speed.”

Neebula Teams with CA Nimsoft to Speed Up the Surfacing of Systems Disruptions

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Neebula ServiceWatch creates and maintains a map of business services that includes their underlying physical, virtual, and network infrastructure. The combined Neebula ServiceWatch and CA Nimsoft Service Desk offering is being delivered as software-as-a-service.

“Mapping the structure of business services gives IT operations a clear view of the components and their relationships, which helps eliminate guess work,” says Yuval Cohen, CEO of Neebula. “By integrating our discovery and mapping capabilities with CA Nimsoft Service Desk, we expect to dramatically improve the operator’s ability to analyze and time to resolve incidents, as well as reduce the number of incidents that are due to changes.”

CA acquires Nolio to speed application deployment

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the purchase price is reportedly in the region of US$40 million.

CA executive vice president for solutions and technology Peter Griffiths described Nolio as a learer in continuous delivery technology for enterprises and service providers.

It automates the application development cycle and providers 'zero touch' delivery.

Some customers report that processes that previously took days to carry out are achieved in minutes with the help of Nolio's technology. In one case, a 12-day task was collapsed to 1.5 minutes.

"I am very pleased to see the Nolio piece [added to our portfolio]," CA's managing director for Australia and New Zealand Bill McMurray told iTWire.

CA Acquires Layer 7 To Bolster Cloud, Mobile Security Strategy

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The announcement was made at the 2013 CA World user conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.

CA said the acquisition complements its CA SiteMinder single sign-on server for Web access management and CA LISA for DevOps and Web application delivery.

Vancouver-based Layer 7 Technologies has its roots in supporting service-oriented architectures by managing and delivering XML Web services that feed application program interfaces. The company has focused on delivering Web services securely in cloud-based scenarios, said Jason Bloomberg, president of McLean, Va.-based research firm ZapThink, A Dovel Technologies Company.

CA's Web, Mobile and XML Firewall addresses XML Web services security for cloud, mobile and composite applications. The company also sells secure gateway technology, which provides Web application firewall capabilities to protect application interfaces from SQL injection and denial-of-service attacks.

CA's Future: DevOps, Mobile, Analytics Key, CEO Says

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

New CA Technologies CEO Mike Gregoire covered a lot of ground in his inaugural CA World keynote address to customers on Sunday evening: the consumerization of IT, the Internet of things, big data, cloud computing, the 80/20 IT spending trap, the changing role of the CIO. But in breaking down four "disruptive trends" -- DevOps, mobility, software-as-a-service and management analytics -- he got to the core of CA's diverse product line while providing a glimpse of the software vendor's future direction.

Gregoire, on the job for four months following the retirement of Bill McCracken in December, prefaced things by tallying up CA's innovation capacity: more than 5,000 engineers worldwide, more than $600 million a year in R&D spending and a "significant portfolio of intellectual property," mostly in products that help customers deliver, manage and secure their systems, networks and applications.

Moving forward, CA will put more emphasis on "organic innovation" -- fewer acquisitions (only one or two a year, Gregoire later told me, compared with the 10 or 15 it did in its heyday) and more internal development. Considering that today's CA is an amalgamation of more than 150 companies acquired over decades, some retrenchment is in order.

CA Technologies Looks to Cloud, Mobility, Big Data Analytics and Other Disruptive Technologies for Business Transformation

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

According to Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies, service providers must meet the needs of a changing IT world in which an increasing number of systems, data and applications exist outside of data centers and firewalls.

New and evolving IT architectures create a number of challenges and demands, and MSPs and cloud providers must rise to the challenge to stay competitive and drive value. Gregoire made his statements in a keynote address to the 5,000 attendees at the inaugural CA World user conference.

"Value is no longer measured by the size of the IT staff, the computing power (MIPs) under management or the square footage of your data centers," said Gregoire. "IT's value today is all about providing the innovation, speed, insight and security the business needs to gain a competitive advantage -- using resources from both inside and outside your company. This creates a huge opportunity for CIOs and other IT leaders to act as a catalyst and enable modern business models and methods -- to not only transform IT, but to transform the business."

Gregoire covered a number of topics in his address, stressing that CA focuses on four technology trends to help customers better deliver and orchestrate IT. DevOps are the first, comprising communication, integration and collaboration among software application developers and IT operations professionals. Having a good relationship between these two teams is important for companies hoping to transform their business model to deliver services faster.

New CA Clarity Playbook Offers Mobile Workspace to IT Execs

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Clarity Playbook is designed to make it easy for IT executives to quickly collaborate with key business process stakeholders and respond more quickly to changing business needs, CA says.

"IT and the business have to work hand in hand to create new revenue streams and deliver a differentiated brand experience — even in the face of finite structural and human resources," Lokesh Jindal, general manager, Service and Portfolio Management at CA Technologies, said in a statement. "CA Clarity Playbook enables this critical coordination by giving executives the ability to nimbly adapt plans, activities and priorities."

With CA Clarity Playbook, IT managers can use a dashboard-style mobile workspace to define strategic objectives, goals and initiatives; collaborate with stakeholders on strategic plans; leverage information from operational systems; assess alignment of IT investments with business objectives; visualize investment financials in real time; and evaluate the impact of new priorities on in-place plans.

Go Big: CA World 2013 Opening Keynote

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA World is focused on products, techniques, and technologies in the areas of SaaS, Mobile, DevOps, and Big Data. The first keynote is led by Mike Gregoire, CA Technologies new CEO. Here are some key numbers for CA Technologies:

•6,000 engineers
•600 million a year spent on R&D
•14,000 employees

We Have Huge Expectations from Our Converged Infrastructure Solutions: Stephen Miles

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Similar to other Service Assurance solutions such as CA Capacity Management, CA Infrastructure Management, and CA Service Operations Insight, CA APM 9.5 is now able to use its performance metrics to automatically identify complex emerging performance issues, enabling triage and diagnosis teams to solve problems faster and understand their environments better.

“In today’s business environment of empowered consumers, commoditized products and intense competition, organizations must establish a unique competitive advantage. The ability to deliver superior customer experience is rapidly becoming that source of differentiation,” said Mike Sargent, GM, Service Assurance, CA Technologies.

“Advanced technology in our Service Assurance portfolio, such as analytics, drives the innovation needed to transform IT operations in some of the world’s largest and most complicated application delivery environments. CA APM’s ability to mine huge amounts of performance data to identify potential issues before they become major problems is one of the many ways we can help deliver reliable business services that provide the best possible end-user experience — while helping our customers free up IT resources, budget, and capacity.”

CA CEO Looks to Channel to Accelerate Change

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The mission Gregoire proclaimed to partners in his CA World channel keynote: Get customers on the innovation curve in cloud computing, mobility and Big Data, which will create deeper relationships and drag more professional and support services.

“If we don’t do this in the next several years, our relevancy will be muted,” Gregoire said.

The appearance before more than 700 CA partners was Gregoire official coming out party since joining the company four months ago. Since taking over the CEO seat from Bill McCracken, Gregoire has put in motion a reshaping of CA to make it a nimble and entrepreneurial.

Channel partners, he and other CA executives said, are essential to the vision of expanding market coverage, updating existing customers through horizontal sales and capturing new customers – particularly in the burgeoning services market.

CA rebuilding ARCserve backup software

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

A new fully integrated package will be offered for on-premises or SaaS deployment.

CA Technologies is preparing a product that will unify its entire data protection portfolio, moving from a disparate collection of products to a single code base and a single console for managing replication, high availability, tape backup and image backup, general manager of data management Mike Crest told iTWire.

The exact name of the new product has yet to be finalised, but the unification of ARCserve Backup, ARCserve Replication and High Availablity, and ARCserve D2D will reduce complexity and backup requirements, he explained.

The product will initially deliver data protection, replication and recovery, with archiving to be added in a later release.

CA Technologies Paints Agile SaaS Future

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Putting the framework in place to manage everything from developing, accessing, management and securing those applications in the era of Big Data is the strategic opportunity that CA Technologies, under the leadership of newly appointed CEO Mike Gregoire, is heading.

Speaking at the CA World 2013 conference, Gregoire, who was appointed four months ago, says that CA Technologies envisions a world where IT organizations will be able to deploy SaaS applications that they have the option of deploying in a public cloud or a private cloud. That cloud, says Gregoire, can be managed by either an internal IT organization or external provider. The important thing, says Gregoire, is to not only give IT organizations options in the cloud, but do so in a way that allows them to change their minds about how they want to deploy any application in the future.

As part of an effort to add credibility to its commitment to these areas, CA Technologies today announced it acquired Nolio, a provider of application release management software that is delivered as a service. It also bought Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of a platform for securely managing application programming interfaces, in addition to unfurling CA Mobile Device Management, a mobile device and application management service that is delivered via the cloud.

Detecting Abnormal Traffic in Real Time with APM 9.5

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

APM does this by comparing current and past performance metrics to create a score indicating how much it deviates from normal traffic patterns. This can be used to detect the beginnings of a denial of service attack, failing hardware, or a rouge application.

CA APM is a transaction-based monitoring suite. Rather than looking at each component (e.g. routers, middle tier servers, databases) in isolation, it follows transactions from end-to-end. This allows it to correlate information in ways that are unavailable to most performance analytics products. With APM 9.5, this capability has been extended to also include the browser. This is enabled via automatic JavaScript injection. APM also includes support for monitoring CDN performance.

Also new in CA APM is the user interface. A web-based UI replaces the installed tools needed by previous versions of CA APM.

An interesting feature of CA APM is its ability to feed data into test environments. When combined with a product like CA Lisa Service Virtualization, you’re simulated services emulate production response times, allowing for a more accurate test.

Mobile device management market heats up, CA Technologies stakes a claim

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Technologies is aiming at the mobile device management (MDM) market, hoping to elbow out some of the smaller companies that have taken an early lead.

Thanks to the rise of the bring your own device culture, MDM is a white hot technology area right now as enterprises struggle to deal with the security issues that arise from the use of personal devices in the office.

It's also a very crowded market — dominated by smaller start-ups and also software developed by smartphone makers themselves, but increasingly the big enterprise players are keen to get involved, especially as mobile devices are used to access more corporate applications.

CA said today it has licenced SAP's Afaria mobile device management software and plans to use that as the basis for its enterprise mobility roadmap.

Ram Varadarajan, general manager of new business innovation at CA rejected suggestions that the company was late to invest in MDM: "We are in the very early stages of the market," he said.

Service Virtualization as an Alternative to Mocking

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

For even the simplest of applications it often involves creating new interfaces, taking on a dependency on an IoC Container, and in general adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. And after all that, you still have to write the mocks themselves, many of which aren’t useful for anything besides simplistic unit tests.

Products such as CA Lisa Service Virtualization offer an alternative approach. Rather than mocking individual classes, these testing tools allow you to mock entire services at the network level. From the application’s perspective it is talking to a real service backend, even though in reality that backend may not even exist yet.

There are two common ways of setting up a virtualized service. The first is to start with the contract (e.g. a WSDL or other protocol-specific descriptor) and create pre-determined responses. This can be done manually using normal Java or .NET code, or you can use a commercial product. An advantage of this method is that the team writing the component doesn’t have to wait for the real version of the service to be completed. The downside is that the real version needs to actually match the fake one, which becomes a questionable proposition as timelines become longer.

New CA Chief Vows to Pick Up Software Maker's Pace

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Inc. (CA) Chief Executive Mike Gregoire wants his company's name to ring out in Silicon Valley--a place he'll paradoxically see less often as he settles into his role as the head of the New York-based software provider.

Roughly three months after taking the helm at CA, Mr. Gregoire said the company plans to consolidate its California office space in Redwood City, Sunnyvale, Campbell and South San Francisco this summer into a much bigger building complex in Santa Clara, at the heart of Silicon Valley. Its work force in the area, now numbering less than 400, will expand to more than 500 in the coming months.

Mr. Gregoire, meanwhile, expects to spend most of his time in New York--where he said it's easiest for customers to meet executives--though raising the company's profile in California remains a top priority.

"Every technology has a grounding effect" on talent, the 47-year-old executive said in a phone interview. "It would be hard for us to ignore that the Valley has a lot of that. I think that's kind of something that we missed out on over the past few years."

Mr. Gregoire acknowledges he's faced "a huge adjustment" adapting a management style honed during an eight-year stint atop Dublin, Calif., human resources company Taleo to a much larger CA, which is based in Islandia, N.Y. Mr. Gregoire left Taleo last year after Oracle Corp. (ORCL) acquired the software provider for $1.9 billion.

"My experience on the West Coast is that people move faster," he said. "We have got to pick up our cadence."

At the same time, Mr. Gregoire was quick to point out factors he considers key advantages for CA, which began as a servicer of mainframe computers and only in recent years began establishing a presence selling software using the new Web-based model many corporations favor. He said company has a "multi-year head start," for instance, on services that helps other developers test software on different machines--a tall order in an age when employees use hundreds of varieties of smartphones and computers.

CA plans to detail some of its new product offerings next week at CA World, its annual meeting for customers in Las Vegas, with a focus on software development tools and products for mobile devices.

The effort comes during a challenging time for many business software companies. Rival International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) Thursday night reported weaker-than-expected core earnings on a per-share basis for the first time since 2005, nearly a month after Oracle Corp. (ORCL) delivered its own disappointing quarterly results.

CA, which reports fiscal fourth quarter earnings next month, has struggled with its own bout of weaker sales, prompting Mr. Gregoire in January to promise a "detailed diagnostic of where we are."

Friday, Mr. Gregoire said the company in general must do a better job turning good ideas into new products.

The new chief executive also said he plans to alter many of the ways the New York company operates, from "old and clunky" enterprise management software CA uses for its own back office, to the simple act of a CEO checking his own email.

"The day of a CEO who sits in his office and has 10 or 15 people taking care of him, those days are over," he said. "That doesn't happen in the Valley."

<END>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with John Michelsen, CTO of CA Technologies

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

John Michelsen is the chief technology officer of CA Technologies. John studied at Trinity University and is considered one of the great innovators in business IT, with over 12 patents awarded to him. In this interview John talks about trends in the business IT world and how it has developed over the years. Furthermore, he discusses possibilities and opportunities for entrepreneurs and gives us his views on innovators in this space.

Sramana Mitra: John, let’s give our readers a bit of context about what is happening at CA these days. We had your predecessor, Don Ferguson, on one of our series a couple of years ago. When we started doing these series, there was still ambiguity on where the cloud movement was going and how much adoption there was in enterprises. Today there is no such ambiguity. It is formally established in the business world that cloud computing is a major trend – there are huge companies being built and major technology companies that are shifting their entire strategy to the cloud. Given that evolution, where are we today, from your vantage point? What are you doing at CA and how do you see the world?

John Michelsen: There are a number of ways I can address that. When you spoke with Don a couple of years back, he would have probably told you that we have a business unit that is dedicated to it and we are making acquisitions specifically to build out a portfolio there. But just like in the general market, within CA cloud has permeated everything we do. There isn’t a business unit that is already fully embracing and delivering via the cloud – whether it is SaaS-based applications in our service portfolio management business, the automation capabilities of IT management and monitoring or the security business that we moved to the cloud and SaaS-based deployment model, embracing cloud and SaaS-based authentication. Cloud is a cross-cut, it is not a vertical. It is its own horizontal that has touched every business unit in a fundamental way.

CA Technologies CTO John Michelsen Talks DevOps 101

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

As business on the Internet in mobile, across the web, and other spaces becomes more competitive development and operations teams need to be more capable than ever at reducing the cycle-time of production.

In order to keep up with the times, and better service clients, CA Technologies looked at its product suite and what clients needed to help produce the best solutions for them. DevOps isn’t something that can be bought off the shelf, certainly some elements stay the same (for example the philosophy and approach) but implementation can differ greatly between an enterprise that provides only web-based services and proprietary back-end and a medium business who deploy only mobile games.

CTO John Michelsen of CA Technologies described the path that the company took from its old view of development and operations into the modern, agile field of DevOps solutions.

CA Technologies already produced a variety of systems that assist clients with DevOps, but they were decoupled and scattered. The company has organized its DevOps products into one suite: it started by creating a traditional automation product, and then married it with Dev/Design Time tooling such as visualization, and finally by writing a new strategy for making DevOps application-centric and operations savvy.

This all centered around the Application Delivery business unit, which focuses on four major pillars:

Giving Enterprise Software a Social Makeover Attracts Users

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

As Eckerle puts it, "we've taken a very different approach toward building a new product from scratch." For one, the Kona project has dedicated personnel for user research and UI/UX-roles missing on previous development products, he says.

Rob Stroud, vice president for service and portfolio management at CA Technologies, says the company spends a lot of development time these days on look and feel, the effective use of color and other user experience considerations.

Recent CA products reflect this thinking, he says. In February, for example, CA debuted Nimsoft Service Desk 7, an IT service management (ITSM) tool that incorporates elements of social media such as feeds and status updates.

The idea is to encourage end users to use the ITSM tool to request services or seek help with IT-related problems. "Making it simple and intuitive is a higher priority than functionality now," Stroud says.

Service Assurance Key to Realizing the Benefits of Cloud and Big Data

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

According to the Evolve Infrastructure Management Into Service Assurance study, “IT evolution is now forming the next wave of the Industrial Revolution, a movement rooted in standardized processes and automation. The economic impact of this wave is the same as in prior waves: accelerated pace of production and higher quality products. In the IT world, these products are business services. The new expectations for speed and quality cannot be served by old-school IT.

Innovative business models and technology use cases such as cloud-based services, collaboration tools, and big data analytics characterize this industrialized IT movement. They all have one thing in common — they need robust monitoring to give them the visibility needed to work. Cloud doesn’t work without solid monitoring; nor do the others.”

V3 Hot Seat: CA Technologies UK CTO Colin Bannister

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In this role, he works closely with customers and partners to ensure they are given the right solution for their needs and encourages their maximum investment in CA Technology solutions.

Bannister has spent 16 years at the firm and one of his most notable accomplishments has been the establishment of a graduate recruitment programme.

Bannister, with over 25 years' experience in the IT industry, is an active member of e-Skills UK and is passionate about encouraging the next generation to start a career in the technology industry. His opinion has been sought by the government as part of its computing curriculum revamp, which is currently up for consultation.

Bannister has previously worked for AMD and began his career as a systems manager for NatWest.

IT is the New Perimeter

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:03:00 -0400

CA Technologies boss on cloud nine

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:24:00 -0400

Are IT leaders just too busy for innovation

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:12:00 -0400

Unipol Gruppo Finanziario S p A con CA Technologies

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:24:00 -0400

news article 214442 ja jp

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:15:00 -0400

CA Technologies sues AppDynamics for patent pilfering

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Use of the technologies is “willful and deliberate patent infringement,” charged Richard Donoghue, chief counsel for litigation for CA, in a statement. “We will take all steps necessary to ensure that our intellectual property is protected.”

The patent infringement lawsuit, filed in the U.S. in the Eastern District Court of New York, seeks undisclosed damages for lost profits and legal costs, as well as an injunction against further use of the CA’s patented intellectual property (IP).

CA obtained the three patents from Wily Technology, which CA purchased in 2006 for $375 million. AppDynamics’ founder, Jyoti Bansal, worked at Wily and, after the acquisition, CA itself. According to the CA complaint, Bansal, then a senior software engineer at Wily, was the original assignee of one patent, and he influenced the design decisions for the other two.

AppDynamics offers a self-titled APM package as both on-premises software and as hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). Like other APM offerings, AppDynamics monitors enterprise application performance and generates information for troubleshooting. CA’s own APM suite, CA Application Performance Management, includes one component — Wily’s Introscope — from the Wily acquisition.

All three patents cover techniques of instrumenting systems for performance monitoring. Both U.S. Patent 7,225,361 and U.S. Patent 7,797,580 detail methods determining that a system has stalled. And U.S. Patent 7,512,935 describes a method of adding more functionality to an exit routine.

New Disruptive Trend Podcast Series for Talking Innovation - Big Data: Big Opportunity or Big Hype? with Lonne Jaffe

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

So, it only made sense to expand on Lonne's unique and insightful take on these trends by launching a follow on series for Talking Innovation called "Disruptive Trends". In each of the 5 new podcasts, Lonne will explore a key trend in more depth, and provide recommendations on how today's IT leaders can leverage them to drive innovation which can transform their business.

CA’s New CEO Jolting Old Guard With Silicon Valley Moxie

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Technologies Inc. (CA) Chief Executive Officer Mike Gregoire, who joined the East Coast software maker in January after a career in Silicon Valley, wanted to figure out if his top lieutenants were nervous enough.

So he instructed product executives to download and test trial versions from six startups offering business software online. These were the types of companies that CA, whose computer programs manage data for Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) (VZ) and other corporate giants, had to watch warily, he said.

The group’s reactions told him everything he needed to know, Gregoire, 47, said in an interview. Some realized CA’s shortcomings and were “sick to their stomachs, like I am” after tinkering with the demos, he said. Others showed little sign of alarm.

CIO "Recipes for Success"

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The typical CIO is in a tough spot right now. The job they thought they would do 10 years ago does not exist anymore. Instead, budgets are slashed, they are being asked to deliver more and more (with less), and there is the constant threat of losing control of the organization as "rogue IT" implementations stream in from all corners of the company. Today, the CIO is strugglingto stay relevant and be viewed as strategic, as the gap between IT and business widens. The problems are many, but their identities are known.

IT viewed as Tactical – not Strategic

Within the confines of the C-suite the bottom line is the driving force, and all aspects of the business should work towards future growth and development. IT is viewed as necessary because it is. But, too often the same business case that other aspects of the company may need to make for investment or a change in course

CA Technologies Puts Application Performance Monitoring in Cloud

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Called CA APM as-a-Service, the CA-hosted offering puts the company’s previously on-premise only technology into a cloud-based model that makes it easier for managed service providers to consume. Here are the details.

First, some background. CA has offered an APM technology for the last 13 years, but it has been offered only on-premise. I spoke with CA’s director of product management Aid Galijatovic and senior product marketing manager Jason Meserve this week about the company’s creation of SaaS version of the technology.

The idea behind the SaaS-based version of CA’s APM may sound familiar. The offering lets organizations pay for a service on a subscription basis rather than worry about spending a large sum on a capital investment in technology. It potentially brings the benefits of APM to a much broader set of customers. That’s more important now as so many organizations are leveraging hybrid IT environments.

Building A Cloud-Savvy Model for TCO and ROI

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Economic benefits almost always lead the argument for moving to cloud computing. We’re told many things: cloud is cheaper; cloud frees up IT resources; cloud reduces capital expenditures; cloud allows organizations to scale with demand.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. The only way to make an informed decision, backed by a solid return on investment (ROI), is to first understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your current and planned cloud infrastructure in advance of any cloud adoption.

This is obvious, right? But you might be surprised to learn that many large organizations commit to cloud computing without really knowing their TCO and projected ROI. It’s not that they’re irresponsible and ignoring this requirement. It’s that the tools most IT teams use to evaluate TCO and ROI are inadequate for application to the cloud.

Creating a Speak-Up Culture

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

An important gauge of the success of any company's compliance training and communications program is whether the company's efforts have created an environment where employees readily raise questions and concerns about the way the company is conducting business.

Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, much has been written about the different avenues companies should take to ensure that potential problems are being escalated internally. With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 and its whistleblower bounty provisions, working to ensure that employees are escalating issues internally has become more important than ever before.

We live in a complex world with many laws and regulations that can complicate the job of compliance officers. Finding ways to encourage a “speak up” culture, however, is an exercise that should be relatively easy, provided companies are willing to devote the time and effort needed to create such a culture, and that companies have the intestinal fortitude to make difficult, but necessary decisions.

The (APM) Times, They Are A Changin: CA Gets SaaS-y

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

“What we found was that customers want to reduce costs and gain financial flexibility,” said Jason Meserve, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Service Assurance Customer Solutions Group, CA. “A lot of our customers, their IT budgets are stagnant or shrinking.”

According to the study, released in November, a majority of enterprises are taking a cautious approach to the adoption of APMaaS today. Most organizations (61%) have no plans to implement APM SaaS, 24% use it in some capacity, but only 4% use an APM SaaS vendor to monitor all of their critical applications. Approximately 15% of respondents planned to implement APM SaaS within the next year, with more than half planning to have their managed service provider deliver it.

CA said one reason for cautious adoption is that many APM SaaS offerings are limited in functionality and therefore don’t meet the needs of the enterprise. The ability to proactively identify issues and rapidly diagnose root causes is where the value is, and today’s APM SaaS offerings don’t provide this level of capability, the company stated.

What is Service Virtualization and how can it help your business?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Today, most large enterprises, no matter what industry they serve, are software developers. The reason? The various ways through which employees and customers can, and want, to engage with businesses has grown exponentially; time, platform and frequency are no longer considerable barriers to achieving what you want to achieve.

Applications that are used by either staff or customers are developed internally by the development team and/or with their development partners. For many organisations, their applications, particularly those which are customer facing, are the differentiators between them and their competitors, so getting it right is crucial.

Development and testing teams are under immense pressure to speed up the testing process in order to deliver applications out to market as quickly as possible, but one of the main issues is the lack of pre-production infrastructure available to them. This is where the ability to create a virtual service, also known as service virtualization, comes into play.

The next big thing on Twitter: #TwitterChats

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

But living in the southeastern urban center of Chennai, India, Jha doesn't necessarily get the chance to have a lot of face-to-face meetings with users, customers, analysts and other techies. So, he makes do using alternatives, and one of his platforms of choice is Twitter.

Jha is a regular contributor to a number of Twitter Chats, which are real-time discussions, usually at a recurring day or time, focused on a particular industry or interest, according to Katie Keating, IBM's cloud social business manager. IBM has been hosting a Twitter chat about cloud computing, using the hashtag #CloudChat, since 2011; a recent Twitter Chat about OpenStack generated more than 1 million impressions, IBM says.

Twitter Chats seem to be all the rage on the microblogging site. Vendors, social media experts, regular users, customers, analysts, journalists and just about anyone can join in on the conversations, which range from a variety of topics. There are Twitter Chats on any number of subject areas, but in the technology industry, they seem to becoming more and more popular.

Finding Better IT Management Capabilities in the Cloud

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Why is IT facing such challenges when it comes to managing cloud alternatives?

Traditional network/system management software has been as complex and costly to acquire and deploy as the customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications on the business side of the organization IBM Corp. ’s OpenView Hewlett-Packard Co. ’s NetView, and IT management applications from other vendors such as BMC Software Inc. and CA Inc., have seldom been fully implemented and often compound the management challenges facing IT organizations., because traditional management software has proven to be too complicated to implement effectively and too expensive to continuously maintain. As a result, only 13.5% of the THINKstrategies/FrontRange survey respondents reported they are very satisfied with their current ITSM solution.

Expert reaction: UK budget announcement and Tech City

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Jacqueline de Rojas, Vice President and General Manager at CA Technologies UKI

"The last year has seen the death of numerous businesses, both large and small. Today's Budget goes some way to helping businesses survive in a struggling economy, which in turn will help avoid the UK heading towards a triple-dip recession. The planned reduction in corporation tax will ease the strain for UK companies, whilst at the same time making Britain a more attractive option for European businesses. Extra support for SMEs in the form of lending schemes and the reduction in National Insurance fees will also provide additional financial support in order to keep these companies alive.

However, businesses cannot simply rely on the Government to keep them afloat. Government initiatives are important but businesses need to take control of their own destiny. For me innovation is at the heart of this. The organisations that invest in innovation through-out the economic downturn will be the ones to grow and flourish in the future."

Why men in IT see women in IT as a valuable asset

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

On the importance of mixed gender teams Jacqueline de Rojas, vice-president and general manager UK & Ireland at CA Technologies, said: “It’s vital we promote a healthy mix of gender, ethnicity and social backgrounds within businesses to drive creativity and innovation. It is only through thinking in new ways and promoting alternative approaches to existing problems that we can hope to grow the economy in these tough economic times.”

De Rojas added: “While I have absolutely no doubt that the male replacements who stepped into each of the above roles are hugely qualified, talented and deserving of their office, there is no question in my mind that UK PLC is worse off for the reduction in women in senior roles.

“Indeed, businesses benefit from diversity at all levels, from the shop-floor right up to the boardroom.”

Change Is Starting To Take Hold At This Company

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

For example, CA (NASDAQ: CA), formerly known as Computer Associates, is another tech company that has shifted over the years to a services-oriented business. Its transition wasn't exactly smooth, but the big problem wasn't the business--it was the executive suite. There were accusations of fraud, and a former CEO was even sentenced to jail time.

While this distraction was going on, some customers were questioning the company's product offerings. Despite these issues, CA has managed to come back from its struggles a stronger company. The company's top line has been growing consistently over the past decade, albeit at a relatively slow pace, with improved profitability helping to push the bottom line higher.

Continued slow but steady growth is likely from here, which could make CA a good candidate for more conservative investors, since an HP turnaround isn't a guarantee. A near 4% dividend is also a compelling draw.

How Secure is Your Cloud? (Infographic)

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In late February, for instance, the Illinois Department of Corrections announced that it will go live with the first part of its new cloud-based criminal justice information system in June. And late last year, Colorado moved to Gmail and Google Apps for Government last last year -- and was preceded by both Pittsburgh and Wyoming (among others).

While cloud security is said to be getting easier, CA Technologies commissioned a study to see just how security in the cloud has progressed over the past two years. Here's a digestable version of what was found...

BDR Cloud Services Market: Innovation vs. Commoditization

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

CA Technologies ARCserve
Everything old is new again. During a breakfast meeting with MSPmentor earlier this week, Mike Crest (CA Technologies senior VP and GM, Data Management) and Chris Ross (VP worldwide sales, data management) described multiple milestones with the company’s ARCserve business.

ARCserve’s history stretches back nearly two decades. But CA Technologies has refreshed and greatly extended the brand — including disk-based disaster recovery. ARCserve originally involved traditional software licensing but CA has vastly overhauled its business — building an MSP program and a managed capacity license program. More details about the momentum will likely emerge at CA World (April 21-24, Las Vegas).

In the meantime consider this tidbit: N-able Technologies, the MSP software company, has emerged as a top 15 worldwide partner for ARCserve. That’s a pretty huge statement, considering ARCserve’s vast global channel. Crest said N-able CEO Gavin Garbutt and President JP Jauvin have been focused, engaged partners who work closely with CA’s management team. N-able’s software closely integrates with ARCserve.

Cloud Security: Too Important to Leave to End Users

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

My jaw dropped as I was reading the findings of the just-released Security of Cloud Computing Users Study conducted by Ponemon Institute for CA Technologies. Only half the respondents evaluate the security of the software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offers they buy. Only half are confident in the security of those services. And only half take common sense precautions, including assessing whether the cloud makes it harder to protect confidential information, proactively assessing which information is too sensitive for the cloud, and auditing or assessing cloud-computing resources before deployment.

Who do organizations make responsible for cloud security? Get ready to be horrified. Read the full article.