Computer Associates International, Inc (NYSE:CA) has announced the availability of measured workload pricing for the company`s comprehensive portfolio of mainframe management software products geared to small to medium enterprises (SMEs) utilising the z/VSE and VSE/ESA operating systems.
This powerful combination of usage-based pricing and best practices management capabilities uniquely enables CA`s SME customers to maximise the performance of their data centre investments and cost-effectively upgrade their data centre processing capacity.
Measured workload pricing bases licensing costs on measured system usage - rather than total potential hardware capacity - enabling customers to more closely align IT spending with changing business requirements.
Customers can establish licensing costs based on measured levels of usage, enabling them to increase usage as needed to support growing demand. CA introduced measured workload pricing to the z/OS market last year.
"We experienced immediate and substantial savings with CA`s measured workload pricing since our development is not currently using the full available capacity of the z/OS system on which our CA solutions run," said Pedro P Araujo Jr, IT manager mainframe platform at Serasa SA, a leading economic and financial analysis and information firm based in Brazil. "In addition, by allowing us to keep our software costs under control, the MWP model is making it easier for us to add several new, high-value solutions from CA to our IT portfolio."
For measured workload pricing utilising z/VSE and VSE/ESA, baseline utilisation is charged at a baseline cost, with additional utilisation charged according to a pre-determined on-demand scale. Measured workload pricing costs are determined by utilisation metrics generated by performance measurement or resource accounting software pre-certified by CA.
A customer with 60 MIPS on a zSeries processor running z/VSE or VSE/ESA, for example, may only be utilising the machine at 50% capacity - with the balance of capacity held in reserve for future business growth or periods of peak demand. Under CA`s measured workload pricing model, licence costs are based on the actual capacity utilised. Customers can reserve the ability to leverage the full power of the mainframe until needed.
This programme also allows SMEs to move forward with mainframe upgrades on a much more cost-effective basis, since their software costs will not be affected until the added capacity is actually utilised. Customers who have an existing CPU- or MIPS-based licence with CA for this portfolio of products can convert those licence terms to a measured workload pricing model to take advantage of its benefits.
"CA`s measured workload pricing offers a very attractive value proposition to VSE customers," said Keith Kaszak, vice-president at PSR Information Systems, a Premier IBM zSeries Business Partner that services high-end to mid-market data centres running z/OS, z/VSE, z/VM and Linux.
"PSR is pleased that CA is making this commitment to the hundreds of companies that have a strategic investment in VSE."
CA is also introducing six aggressively priced SME Management Solution Sets, available exclusively under measured workload pricing, that incorporate multiple integrated products to support focused best practice areas. The breadth and integration of these solutions empower SME IT organisations to fully optimise utilisation of data centre resources, reduce total cost of ownership, maintain alignment of utilisation with business value, and quickly respond to changing enterprise computing requirements.
The solution sets are organised under the following disciplines:
* Automation and event management - provides policy mechanisms for simplifying or eliminating manual operations, optimising system performance and ensuring system availability.
* Storage management - addresses the full range of operational tasks associated with DASD and tape devices - including backup/restore, data set allocation and management of physical and virtual resources.
* Security management - provides security administration, user provisioning, security automation and auditing via a highly intuitive user interface - enabling personnel with minimal security and mainframe skills to implement industry best practices.
* Output management - covers all aspects of report production and output management with one single objective - delivering the right information to the right destination in the right format at the right time
* Performance management - provides policy-based mechanisms for capturing and responding to real-time system information.
* VSAM management - includes backup, restore, catalogue management, and automated analysis and tuning of VSAM-based files.
"As SMEs pursue new business opportunities, they need to expand their IT capabilities at a faster rate than they can realistically increase their IT spending," said Mark Combs, senior vice-president at CA. "By taking advantage of both our measured workload pricing and our SME-centric management solution packages, these customers can fulfil their business requirements even as they control the growth of their IT costs."
More information on CA`s SME mainframe management solution sets is available at http://ca.com/zvse
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Computer Associates International, Inc (NYSE:CA), one of the world`s largest management software companies, delivers software and services across operations, security, storage, lifecycle and service management to optimise the performance, reliability and efficiency of enterprise IT environments. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, New York, and operates in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com
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