IT management software and solutions specialist CA Technologies
announced the general availability of three products in the CA
Automation Suite, launched in October. CA Configuration Automation r12,
CA Process Automation r3, and CA Server Automation r12 are designed to
help SMBs (small and medium-size businesses) expedite their passage to a
virtualized, cloud computing infrastructure.
The company’s Configuration Automation r12 is a business service
automation product designed to enable greater standardization of IT
services, reduced downtime and increased compliance with regulatory
and IT security policies. Configuration Automation provides application
and system discovery and dependency mapping, as well as configuration
monitoring and remediation, across a range of applications and
distributed physical and virtual servers. Features include granular
configuration tracking and auditing, more than 1,000 out-of-the-box
application, service, compliance and system templates and policies and
the ability to use either agent or agent-less approaches.
Process Automation r3 is also a business service automation product
designed to help reduce operational expenses, increase staff
productivity and increase speed in delivering IT services by
documenting, automating and orchestrating a range of processes across
platforms, applications and IT groups. Features include a graphical
designer interface, visual exception handling, and more than 50 CA
Technologies and third-party prebuilt data connectors and Quickstarts,
including ones for Amazon Web Services, and VMware vSphere. These
features provide a context of the tasks being automated to architects.
Server Automation r12 is an infrastructure automation product that
provisions, patches and deploys applications and services across
physical and virtual systems based on standard templates and
performance metrics. New capabilities include support for new
hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V and support for Cisco UCS.
Client Automation r12.5 and CA Virtual Automation r3 were made
generally available in May 2010 and July 2010, respectively. CA
Workload Automation r11.3 is planned to be generally available by
spring 2011, according to a company release.
“The CA Automation Suite is arguably the single most cohesive package
of automation offerings on the market today,” said Dennis Drogseth,
vice president of research for Enterprise Management Associates. “CA
Technologies has shown extraordinary vision in creating a unique
portfolio that should effectively address the requirements of both its
more progressive customers, as well as customers seeking a more
intelligible approach to getting started with automation.”
Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds is designed for enterprises
interested in building an internal private cloud, or planning to
leverage a public cloud as a part of their data center strategy.
Automation Suite for Hybrid Clouds helps standardize IT service
delivery to business customers through a unified, self-service
reservation system and seamless administration. The integrated solution
includes CA Process Automation, CA Server Automation, CA Virtual
Automation, and CA Service Catalog and Accounting.
“Automation, orchestration and virtualization management are top
priorities for enterprise and larger mid-market customers," states Mary
Johnston Turner, IDC research director for enterprise system management
software. "These technologies are critical enablers of private cloud
environments. According to a recent IDC survey of large North American
companies, those that are committed to deploying a private cloud
environment are almost three times as likely to be planning for
widespread production use of automation, orchestration and
virtualization management tools when compared to organizations that
have not yet defined a private cloud strategy. These companies expect
use of these tools to significantly improve IT staff productivity and
increase utilization of in-house system resources.”
Midmarket News & Reviews 
