CA Technologies' New Service Assurance Portfolio Helps Customers Enhance User
Satisfaction and Increase Revenue
Comprehensive Portfolio Enables Improved Service Levels Today and Ability to Maintain Them While Migrating to New Technologies Tomorrow
LAS VEGAS, May 17 /CNW/ - CA WORLD - CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) announced new versions of its Service Assurance products to help customers more readily optimize business service performance and confidently manage growth across any dynamic environment. Today's announcement further supports CA Technologies' Service Assurance strategy, also announced today.
CA Service Assurance helps organizations quickly understand the health, risk and performance of services, applications and transactions, as well as the quality of end-user experience. With these new product updates, CA Technologies' Service Assurance customers can help IT executives, operations staff, and application owners:
- Increase revenue and deliver consistent performance for customer-facing applications; - Establish common service assurance metrics, processes and technology that can adapt to, and accelerate adoption of virtual, cloud, and multisourcing opportunities; and - Reduce troubleshooting time, better prioritize staff activity, and proactively plan for future growth and change.
The new features and functionality reinforce CA Technologies' commitment to deliver products that are easy to use, customizable, and able to be integrated with each other and third-party products, and offer the greatest flexibility for platforms and infrastructure:
Business Service Analytics
CA Spectrum(R) Service Assurance r2.0
- Connectors to CA OPS/MVS Event Management and Automation and Terma Software Labs' JAWS workload management solution extend the product's business service risk and impact analysis beyond application, network, database and distributed systems to include mainframe and workload issues. - Customization capabilities enable users to add SQL-based information from outside sources to the product's real-time service dashboard, showing business data and service technical metrics together for a view into the financial impact of service quality, risk and associated problems. - Enhanced service management allows users to define complex escalation policies for any alarm property and time of day, reduce alarm noise, improve service desk awareness of the business priority of tickets raised by domain managers, and improve ticket control. - Business Objects BOXI 3.1 support enables users to create reports based on data from both CA Spectrum Service Assurance and CA Technologies' infrastructure management products, to help enrich communication across the IT organization and with business stakeholders.
Application Performance Management
CA APM r9.0
- New auto-discovery of application paths help reduce complexity, simplify deployment, enhance ease of use, and save engineer time. This is designed to allow deployment and use by non-expert users. - The ability to identify and group transaction services together with application or business process mapping gives customers a comprehensive application view of the business transaction, including where problems are occurring in the application path. - Cross-enterprise support added for TIBCO and webMethods middleware provides increased transaction visibility in complex SOA environments.
Infrastructure Management
CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2.1
- Support for Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) environments helps ensure the health and reliability of IT services by discovering all of the components - including chassis, blades, and switches - and collecting performance and availability metrics for each. - Support for virtualization products IBM logical partitioning (LPAR) and Microsoft Hyper-V adds to existing support for VMware and Solaris Zones. eHealth discovers IBM LPARs and Hyper-V environments and associated virtual machines (VMs) and monitors and collects performance and availability metrics for the virtual resources, including hosts, VMs, and resource pools.
CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager r9.2
- Route analytics capabilities integrated via a partnership with Packet Design enable IP routing protocol information to be viewed and correlated from within Spectrum's root cause and fault isolation engine to help customers capture critical routing events in real time, resolve associated faults, and plan for change. - New reporting functionality is designed to allow customers to combine network service, fault and configuration data with third-party IT management data sources for a more customized, comprehensive view of IT service delivery.
CA NetQoS(R) Performance Center r6.0
- New end-user troubleshooting workflows include the ability to more quickly determine the network, server and/or application components responsible for poor application performance, visually correlate infrastructure events from across the CA Service Assurance portfolio, and drill down to infrastructure elements such as servers, routers, and interfaces to solve the issue. - To facilitate postmortem investigations, a new Advanced Comparison feature analyzes application or server performance across multiple time ranges.
CA NetQoS Unified Communications (UC) Monitor r3.0
- This product now includes support for Avaya UC environments. Customers with Avaya only or mixed-vendor environments (including Avaya, Cisco Unified Communications Manager and/or Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007) can now monitor UC quality of experience while managing network quality of service from a single, Web-based console.
Demos of these product enhancements may be seen at CA World 2010, being held this week in Las Vegas.
Supporting Quotes
"CA's Spectrum Service Assurance solution is a highly effective and easy-to-use tool that provides our customers with comprehensive and proactive management of their enterprise infrastructure," said Richard Carlson, vice president of technology at PSR Associates, Inc. "It allows them to aggregate data from multiple CA Technologies' and third party monitoring tools into an easy to use, drag-and-drop, centralized solution that provides a top down perspective on their entire environment. Spectrum Service Assurance helps our customers monitor their Business Services in a real-time, proactive fashion that ultimately reduces downtime and enhances productivity."
"Layer 3 issues can be some of the most difficult problems to identify and resolve, particularly against the stringent service level objectives we have for network availability," said Donavan Pantke, network engineer at Appriss, a leading information service provider to law enforcement agencies and citizens. "By adding the Packet Design technology to our CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager environment, we will have the capability to resolve Layer 3 issues much faster. We also can simulate 'what-if' scenarios to help us correctly grow the network required to support our rapidly-changing environment."
"The new version of the NetQoS Performance Center improves my ability to give users from across our IT organization and at different sites access to the application and network data they need," said Stuart Weenig, Windows/network engineer for Republic National Distributing Company. "The NetQoS Performance Center is now truly one pane of glass for both executives and engineers to go for monitoring, problem solving, and planning without always needing to delve into the underlying products."
General Availability
CA Spectrum Service Assurance r2.0, CA APM r9.0, CA eHealth Performance Manager r6.2.1, CA Spectrum Infrastructure Manager r9.2, CA NetQoS Performance Center r6.0, and CA NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor r3.0 will all be available by June 30, 2010, as part of the CA Service Assurance portfolio of products.
Additional Resources
- CA Advances Service Assurance for Enterprises and Service Providers - http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?CID=133661 - CA Service Assurance White Paper: Innovations in Managing IT Service Quality - http://www.ca.com/us/products/collateral.aspx?cid=204171 - CA Service Assurance Solution Brief: Assure the Quality and Availability of Business Services to Your Customers - http://www.ca.com/us/products/collateral.aspx?cid=236562 - CA Spectrum Service Assurance Flash Demo - http://www.ca.com/us/demos/collateral.aspx?cid=202791
About CA Technologies
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments - from mainframe and physical, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies' innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA to manage their evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA at www.ca.com. Follow CA on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cainc.
Legal Notices
Copyright (C) 2010 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. Nothing herein (i) affects the rights and/or obligations of CA or its licensees under any existing or future written license agreement or services agreement relating to any CA software product; or (ii) amends any product documentation or specifications for any CA software product. The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described herein remain at CA's sole discretion.
For further information: Media Contact: Nazia Khan, Environics Communications for CA Technologies, (416) 969-2781, [email protected]
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