CA reinvents cloud solutions

CA Technologies unveiled a set of cloud-based solutions for all players in the cloud ecosystem, from developers to vendors, at the CA World event in Las Vegas, yesterday.

The company released both updated versions of existing solutions and completely new offerings, spanning services from planning to management to security in the cloud.

“Organisations are choosing private and public cloud infrastructures to deliver the agility needed for competitive advantage. But with cloud adoption comes an increased level of complexity in how IT manages and secures this new hybrid environment,” said David Dobson, executive VP and group executive, Customer Solutions Group.

The portfolio includes several technologies to enable companies to deliver business services across the public, private and hybrid cloud. For organisations starting on the journey, CA Cloud 360 helps them evaluate which cloud applications are best suited for private, public or hybrid clouds, as well as traditional models.

According to CA, Cloud 360 gives CIOs the ability to create new cloud services in three months, allowing them to deliver business services when the company needs it, at predictable cost and return.

“Enterprise CIOs are at a crossroads, shifting their focus from traditional cost-cutting activities to delivering innovation and business value through cloud computing,” said Adam Famularo, GM, Enterprise and Cloud Solutions.

The Cloud 360 solution guides CIOs through the business services rationalisation process for cloud via a four-phase approach. It allows them to model and simulate service components, identify capacity requirements, and understand cost structures to improve designs before making final investment decisions. It also starts the process of assembling re-usable services into service bundles.

The company says the offering combines products from its IT management portfolio with virtualisation and cloud consulting skills, many of which were brought in through CA's 2010 acquisition of cloud consultancy 4Base Technologies.

“Cloud Commons unites businesses that need cloud services with developers creating cloud services and vendors who sell these services, to get enterprises to cloud faster,” said Andi Mann, VP of enterprise and cloud solutions.

He said there over 25 different cloud services available for purchase in Cloud Commons, as well as multiple cloud service providers, in what is “the first real enterprise app store for cloud solutions”.

Mark Ortenzi, CEO of cloud service vendor ScaleMatrix, which is part of the Cloud Commons community, says the ecosystem allows potential customers to evaluate and buy cloud services, and tap into resources, all in one location. “This also gives other managed service providers the ability to buy cloud services to add to their portfolio, and market and distribute them to our end-users - with the transaction happening seamlessly on the back-end.”

For developers and software vendors, the development studio allows them to create cloud-ready solutions for private and public cloud environments at no cost, using CA's AppLogic cloud management platform.

Members can collaborate and manage software projects, prepare applications to run in the cloud and test their performance, using specialised tools and test grids.

CA Automation Suite for Clouds, first announced in July, also received a revamp. The service enables organisations to speed up the time it takes to roll out cloud solutions, reducing costs and accelerating time to market.

Developers can use pre-integrated workflows for automated self-service delivery of virtual and physical infrastructure and application services, to speed up deployment and respond to fluctuating business demands, said CA.

It also provides financial insight through a billing and reporting engine that automatically associates service usage to departments, cost centres or customers, bringing a better understanding of the cost of service delivery.

The new release features support for additional platforms such as CA AppLogic, VCE vBlock Infrastructure Platforms, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM LPAR, Oracle Solaris Zones and VMware View. It also offers enhanced cloud management security and orchestration capabilities, to further unify cloud automation and simplify the management of multiple clouds in a single interface.

Finally, the latest release of CA Application Performance Management offers a unified application infrastructure and network performance solution that CA says helps eliminate hybrid cloud infrastructure blind spots so customers are in control of the end-user experience.

According to CA, by linking transaction performance to the failing application, network and infrastructure component, CA APM enables customers to quickly isolate, diagnose and resolve problems across technology silos.

“This 360-degree view of the environment provides a single source of truth that allows customers to gain better control of the end-user experience across a hybrid cloud while providing data on how well it delivers on business objectives and SLAs.”

Dobson stressed that these new cloud offerings from CA are aimed at providing a business services platform that enable customers to leverage the advantages of cloud computing, so they can deliver IT solutions that move at the rapid pace of business today.

* Lezette Engelbrecht is hosted in Las Vegas by CA Technologies Southern Africa.