CA, OPNET sign worldwide distribution agreement

CA and OPNET Technologies have announced a multi-year worldwide distribution agreement whereby CA will distribute OPNET's IT Guru Systems Planner solution, as well as the OPNET Mainframe Model, worldwide. Under the agreement OPNET and CA will also cooperate in offering professional services and support.

OPNET's IT Guru Systems Planner understands the impact of planned changes to a customer's processing environment including new application deployment, changes in business workload, and server consolidation. Offered separately, the OPNET Mainframe Model enables customers to quickly and accurately model the performance and capacity of mainframe (z/OS) systems.

When combined with CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) and CA MICS Resource Management software, OPNET's IT Guru Systems Planner enables customers to more effectively implement business-critical services across a diverse IT infrastructure, including virtualised environments. Through a common user interface, customers can simulate "what-if" scenarios to model both performance and capacity to help ensure response times continue to meet service level agreements when configuration changes are proposed, or new applications are planned across both mainframe and distributed infrastructures.

"We are pleased to be teaming with CA to offer OPNET's IT Guru Systems Planner to CA's user community," said Alain Cohen, president and CTO, OPNET Technologies. "Whether focused on distributed, virtualised servers or z/OS mainframes, we're confident that CA customers will find tremendous value in applying OPNET's advanced analytics to the rich measurement data generated by Unicenter NSM and CA MICS. Through this agreement, we are making it easy for CA customers to purchase OPNET's systems planning solutions by simply adding them to their contract with CA."

"This agreement makes it easier for the thousands of CA customers currently using Unicenter NSM and CA MICS to manage their distributed and mainframe systems to even more intelligently and proactively manage processing capacity across the enterprise," said John Kane, senior vice-president, CA. "By using OPNET's technology in conjunction with CA's systems management software, these customers can make smarter, more confident decisions about infrastructure in order to deliver resilient, high-performing application services."

CA will begin reselling OPNET's IT Guru Systems Planner and the OPNET Mainframe Model later this month. This announcement builds upon an existing referral agreement that the companies signed in 2005.