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CA Technologies is like the U.S. Marines in one important respect: It is among the few, the proud and the brave IT product and service companies that continue to help enterprises bring their mainframes into the 21st century.
With this in mind, the New York-based company told eWEEK June 15 that it has acquired a specialized software company to help them do this. It is the awkwardly named, Germany-based zIT Consulting, which makes software that helps administrators optimize the workloads on IBM System z data center mainframes.
Financial details of the acquisition were not made available.
CA does a lot of things for enterprise software developers. It makes tools and provides services of all kinds, including DevOps-related, agile-development products; security, software-as-a-service and automation tools; and it even has an API warehouse. CA has quietly become one of the largest one-stop developer shops in the world.
But it remains focused on mainframes, too. The acquisition, CA said, is proof that it is dedicated to continuing to help its customers with their mainframe computers–some of which, frankly, date back into the last century–to morph into what CA calls a “modern software factory” in order to obtain achieve better long-term value from their investments.
This is all about improving management of service-level agreements for critical workloads and to enable continuous optimization of mission-critical application delivery and operations. These are not simple tasks to accomplish on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
The acquisition, CA said, also will enable users to:
- automate capacity planning and real-time performance monitoring to provide business continuity expected by technical stakeholders;
- deliver mainframe platform economics for business stakeholders through an easy-to-use, fully automated, and real-time-responsive dynamic capping that will help lower monthly software license charges (MLCs); and
- deliver better and faster service with fewer skills, lower costs and prevent problems, not just react to them.
“Spikes in workload demand are always among the biggest problems admins of mainframes have to deal with on a regular basis,” CA’s General Manager of Mainframes Ashok Reddy told eWEEK. “Using our new tools from zIT Consulting, admins can automate how the workload is moved or divided to continually optimize to bring the load to where the free capacity may be available.”
For more information on CA’s mainframe capabilities, go here.
Enhancements to CA’s Agile Product Lineup
The company last week unveiled CA Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and new features in its DevOps platform, CA Agile Central. It also announced new integrations between those two products that the company claims creates a 360-view of all work being delivered from agile and traditional teams across the enterprise.
Enterprises must be able to make important financial and portfolio decisions quickly in order to sense and respond to market changes and customer demands in real time. In order to so with confidence, companies need a transparent view into the status of their investments in real-time, so they can make better, fact-driven decisions.
CA is attempting to solve these issues here. With this, CA’s enhancements to CA PPM and CA Agile Central offer:
- Greater insights into current and future resource planning, including the industry’s first telescoping capability to manage time scales within a single view.
- New features for agile teams that offer flexibility in how teams work, without losing essential alignment to business strategy.
- Integrations that allow customers to identify and prioritize the most important work.
The latest CA PPM solution offers the industry’s first telescoping capability to more easily manage time scales within a single view. Resource managers can better anticipate and plan for future demand of resources while project coordinators have more visibility to better manage and staff current projects.
Additionally, new functionality includes built-in conversations to encourage collaboration, while pinning and filtering capabilities make it easy for users to isolate specific resource allocation problems and staffing conflicts.
CA Agile Central’s key capability, Team Board, bridges the gap between team-level autonomy and company strategy with an unprecedented level of process flexibility, supporting Scrum and Kanban at the team level, while ensuring visibility and alignment to business strategy.
For more information, go here.
