Key takeaways from CA Technologies Built to Change Summit 2018

The CA Technologies’ 2nd annual Built to Change Summit(BTC) lead to the release of a whole bunch of exciting new technology and research projects pertaining to DevOps, GDPR regulations, Agile project management, and more. The overall theme of the event being to make their development platforms “frictionless” for their users, allowing them to create and maintain their own “modern software factories.”

CA Veracode SourceClear

CA’s acquisition of SourceClear and Veracode left many wondering how the three companies’ technologies would be blended together into an integrated platform. At BTC those questions were answered by a new SaaS-based security analysis tool, CA Veracode SourceClear. The platform helps mitigate the vulnerability risks that can come from open source components in a project while allowing the user to maintain all of the functionality that the component has to offer. The inherent problem with Open Source being, as Mark Curphy, CEO of SourceClear, put it, “Reusable code means reusable vulnerabilities.” By scanning Open Source projects for vulnerabilities and making sure all components are up to date, the companies wish to keep developer’s projects secure and up to date.

“We’re seeing the benefits of advanced analytics, machine-learning and artificial intelligence today and for the future,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer at CA Technologies. “CA is helping every modern software factory by integrating and incorporating these capabilities with big data, automation, and security to help customers realize even greater value from their technology investments.”

Automation 12.2

At BTC, CA has also announced the forthcoming release of version 12.2 of the CA Automic One Automation platform, bringing greater integrations to their CA Jarvis analytics platform and CA Continuous Delivery Director. The platform also receives new features like automation-as-code and improvements to how it works in the continuous delivery toolchain.

“The CA Automic One Automation engine allows TASC to better orchestrate our development toolchain and plug in the right tools as we need them,” says John Gildenzoph, DevOps engineer at TASC. “Whether we need to deploy software or new instances, our automation engine gives us the flexibility to deliver new services at scale. With the CA Automation platform, we are now a more nimble and agile organization and instead of being impeded by arduous processes, we can focus on what is important - driving business value for the company.”

CA-IBM partnership

CA and IBM have partnered up to provide their mainframe customers access to development, testing, application management, and regulatory compliance services within IBM’s new Cloud Managed Services on z System(zCloud).

Together, IBM and CA Technologies will provide a suite of mainframe software solutions, including the newly-released CA Brightside. A solution built to help integrate the mainframe into enterprise DevOps workflows and designed to increase the productivity of development teams.

“Our clients are accelerating their digital transformation and many are incorporating the mainframe as an essential part of their transformation,” said Philip Guido, general manager of Infrastructure Services for IBM Global Technology Services. “To assist our clients, IBM introduced Cloud Managed Services on z Systems. This service combines the security and power of IBM’s mainframe with the flexibility and scalability of the IBM Cloud. IBM and CA are committed to deepening the platform’s role in enterprise digital transformation.”

CA Accelerator

CA debuted some of the latest progress in their internal start-up incubator program that helps their employees to start their own company within the umbrella of CA. Using the lean startup funding methodology, CA gives their accelerated start-up teams the funding and resources required in order to design, construct, and deploy the products they want to build in order to one day become fully integrated into CA or become their own standalone products.

One such intrapreneur that made an appearance was Andrew Homeyer, founder of Waffle.io, a startup that has developed a new product that is a combination of an agile product management platform with a Git repository dashboard. Continuing the theme of the conference by helping create a frictionless development experience between product managers and developers.

IoT Security

The biggest hurdle to IoT adoption by enterprises is security. Due to the lack of confidence in these new hardware technologies and the fact that those companies who do invest in the technology end up with a big security bill. That’s why the CA research team says they want to look into how Agile DevOps methods with an emphasis on AI-enabled testing could be the cure that is ailing the industry. Using machine learning and deep learning to make sure that unforeseen use cases are accounted for and fixing the vulnerabilities that could give hackers entry.

Privacy and Data Protection for Engineers(PDP4E)

GDPR has caused quite the stir in recent weeks as companies continue to evolve in order to meet the new mandated design standards of their software architectures. That’s why CA says that PDP4E research may be the solution that companies need, a project that desires to help software engineers keep up with the security and privacy protocols of the times and develop software that is designed with privacy in mind. It materializes data protection regulations in development tools, risk analytics, data lifecycles, and much more moving forward.

“As we rely on AI and new development processes to uncover ways to make GDPR compliance easier, our goal is to reduce the burden and potential financial impact that this regulation could impose on organizations while streamlining compliance,” said Victor Muntés, vice president of Strategic Research, CA Technologies.