Computer Associates International, Inc today announced the availability of new Measured Workload Pricing for the company`s comprehensive portfolio of mainframe management software products.
This powerful combination of usage-based pricing and best practices management capabilities uniquely enables CA customers to maximise the performance of their data centre investments.
An extension of CA`s acclaimed FlexSelect licensing programme, 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 licence costs based on measured levels of usage, while reserving the ability to increase usage as needed to support growing demand. Baseline utilisation is charged at a baseline cost, with additional utilisation charged according to a pre-determined on-demand scale.
A customer with 1000 MIPS on its zSeries for z/OS processor, for example, may only be utilising the machine at 65% capacity - with the balance of its capacity held in reserve for future business growth and/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.
Measured Workload Pricing is based on quarterly reports generated by IBM`s native Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT).
"By employing Measured Workload Pricing within their mainframe business model, CA is positioned to better support our mutual customers` computing strategies," said Erich Clementi, general manager, zSeries, IBM System Group. "Their usage-based pricing will be good news for the customers of the zSeries platform, as it supports variable software charging, which is aligned with the concepts of an on-demand business model."
CA is making Measured Workload Pricing available for new and existing customers across its unmatched portfolio of mainframe management software.
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 these benefits.
"Enterprises must continue to wrest additional value out of their data centre technology investments in order both to maintain production IT services and deploy new applications within existing resources constraints," said Frank DeSalvo, research director at Gartner, Inc. "Enhanced management tools, usage-based pricing of mainframe software and rigorous implementation of proven best practices can all help IT achieve these critical value gains."
CA is also introducing 20 aggressively priced mainframe management solution sets, available exclusively under Measured Workload Pricing, that incorporate multiple integrated products to support a focused best practice area. The breadth and integration of these solutions empower today`s 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 ever-changing enterprise computing requirements.
The solution sets are organised under the following disciplines:
* Network management - maximises operational performance through the integrated management of SNA and TCP/IP networks, overcoming fragmented management processes that diminish effectiveness and drive up the cost of network ownership.
* Systems management - provides policy- and role-based mechanisms for capturing real-time system information, simplifying or eliminating manual operations, optimising system performance and ensuring system availability.
* Application and database management - enables customers to successfully cope with the ownership challenges associated with large, complex database environments.
* Job optimisation - enables computing tasks to be executed on any platform with available cycles, empowering IT to respond quickly to planned and unplanned events - including spikes in business activity, system failures and disaster scenarios.
* Information lifecycle management - empowers users to access, search, modify and distribute information from mainframe and distributed platforms in a common, intuitive manner - while providing the security and administrative controls essential for information management best practices.
*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.
* Identity and access 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.
* Change and configuration management - manages the entire development process from initial design through distribution to maximise the efficiency of IT while reducing complexity and cost.
* Testing and fault management - improves system performance, programmer productivity and application dependability by providing an interactive testing and debugging environment for applications - enabling development teams to deliver high-quality software more quickly, cost-efficiently and consistently.
* Financial administration - provides query and reporting capabilities of information asset ownership and usage essential for effective capacity planning, accurate impact analysis and proper alignment of spending with business priorities.
"CA continues to respond to the evolving needs of our worldwide customer base by delivering state-of-the-art technology and implementing state-of-the art business practices," said Mark Combs, senior vice-president of corporate pricing at CA. "With our new Measured Workload Pricing and our peerless mainframe management technology, CA is an extremely compelling partner for companies seeking to survive and thrive in an increasingly challenging, technology-intensive business environment."
More information on CA`s mainframe management solution sets is available at http://ca.com/mainframe/mwp.
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Computer Associates International, Inc (NYSE:CA), the world`s largest management software company, 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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