CA World 2015, CA Technologies annual conference, saw over 5,000 CA customers, partners, analyst media and others gather together to learn more about the company’s transformation as it continues to hone the focus of its offerings around DevOps, Agile Management and Security disciplines across all platforms – mobile, mainframe, distributed and cloud.
At the event, CEO Michael P. Gregoire provided insight into the company’s new products and enhancements at a media only Q&A which featured around 50 journalists and analysts. I have to say, I was very impressed with his approach to transforming CA. He was frank about the challenges the company was facing and had solid answers in relation to the company’s current product offerings and the company’s future focus. I didn’t realize how much transformation the company was really undertaking and it was obvious that they were wall ahead of the bell curve in taking on the Application Economy.
New DevOps Solutions
Among the DevOps solutions was the announcement that CA Service Virtualization is now available via Microsoft Azure Marketplace to simplify and speed development, simulation and testing. In addition, new CA API Management solutions can accelerate the app development process with CA Live API Creator and CA Mobile App Services, which give developers core app functionality in the form of APIs and software developer kits.
The DevOps portfolio also includes two new, organically developed monitoring solutions: CA Virtual Network Assurance, which gives operations teams assurance for dynamic, next generation virtual networks and legacy infrastructure; and CA Unified Infrastructure Management for z Systems, a unified infrastructure management solution to provide comprehensive visibility of services that span mobile-to-mainframe systems in a single view.
New Agile Management Solutions
CA’s new Agile Management portfolio combines select software and service components from CA Technologies and Rally, which CA recently acquired in July 2015, to provide a Agile technology and education platform that helps redefine how businesses plan and execute deliverables.
New Security Solutions
CA has updated its identity-centric security portfolio with a newly retooled CA Privileged Access Manager, which offers breach prevention capabilities designed to protect privileged accounts in VMware NSX environments. The platform also provides the opportunity to improve operational efficiency through automation that helps them keep pace with their dynamic cloud and virtualization environments. CA also announced updates to its CA Identity Suite for a simplified user experience, and the new CA Data Content Discovery to find and classify sensitive mainframe information.
Mainframe Solutions
One the points Gregoire strongly made in relation to the topic of mainframes is that we shouldn’t expect them to see them disappear anytime soon. Among the mainframe centric announcements were updates to the CA Unified Infrastructure Management for z Systems which accelerates problem resolution offering a unified view across mainframe and distributed systems helping companies improve end-user experiences and reduce down time of revenue generating systems that support the growing number of mainframe-to-mobile apps.