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LAS VEGAS—Computer Associates International Inc. on Monday at CA World sought to build momentum behind its Enterprise IT Management initiative by officially launching 26 enhanced Unicenter offerings and three new products that exploit CAs common services platform.
But rather than touting individual products, CA tried to raise the level of discussion to solutions aimed at helping IT operate more like a business and delivering greater value.
The EITM vision “establishes a new paradigm for how companies will manage and secure their IT environments. Many companies have fragmented IT solutions,” said Russ Artz, executive vice president of technology for the Islandia, N.Y. company. “EITM is about simplifying and unifying management and securing IT environments. Its also about aligning IT to the business. We want to map IT services to the business and measure what value it provides.”
Toward that end, CA announced CA Service Availability, a combination of new Unicenter and existing eTrust, BrightStor, eHealth and Spectrum components intended to help IT improve services, reduce downtime and IT operations costs, and make IT more responsive to changing business requirements. New releases of Unicenter Network and Systems Management and Unicenter Advanced Systems Management—CAs systems management offerings—are integral to the Service Availability umbrella.
Both provide common and continuous discovery of IT assets that are added to the core MDB (Management Database), Web-based reporting, and enhanced integration with third-party tools.
Unicenter NSM r 11 adds Web-based configuration management, advanced event correlation, automated alert escalation, policy-based notification, and enhanced Linux and z/OS support. The new release also adds virtualization support, task automation, role-based access, dynamic resource allocation, and a new Web-based dashboard for remote administration.
To help customers migrate to the new architecture underlying the enhanced offerings, CA also created Enterprise IT Management Accelerators. The EITM Accelerators combine CA patented, integrated IT workflows, best practices methodologies, a reference architecture and services. They are intended to help users get started and quickly get value out of the new integration afforded by the common services that all the new offerings exploit.
The common services platform provides a workflow engine, the MDB, a common user interface and shared policies.
CA also launched CA Service Management, aimed at helping IT put in place best practices to align IT operations with business needs and gain better insight into operational performance. CA Service Management includes a new Unicenter Service Intelligence dashboard for executives that pulls together data from multiple applications to improve decision making around strategic purchases, improve risk management, and better manage performance and utilization. It is designed to take into account and weigh risks, costs, vendors, and service consumption.
CA Service Management also incorporates seven enhanced offerings—some from CAs former ICAN SP products. The seven include Unicenter Service Catalog, Unicenter Service Assure, Unicenter Service Metric Analysis, Unicenter Service Desk, Unicenter Service Desk Knowledge Tools, Unicenter Service Desk Dashboard and Unicenter Service Accounting.
Another new offering, Unicenter Asset Intelligence, takes asset data from the MDB and makes it more meaningful so that users can make better decisions about assets, such as finding underused resources and consolidating them to reduce the number of server licenses a company must pay for.
One beta tester was able to eliminate 13 Microsoft Advanced Services licenses using the new, integrated offerings that exploit the MDB. “We also saved pure support costs by consolidating down to one standard version of Adobe using Asset Intelligence,” said Harry Butler, support center manager at EFW Inc., in Fort Worth, Texas.
All new offerings are available now, except for NSM r 11, which is due early next month.