CA today announced planned software enhancements, integrations, and services designed to help organisations realise faster time-to-value in their IT service management initiatives and improve IT economics in their organisation. By unifying related IT service management features and functionality into three unified products, CA streamlines the delivery of automation to more effectively deliver and support business-aligned IT services. CA Service Desk Manager r12 and CA CMDB r12, also announced today, are essential planned components of CA's move to simplify IT service management delivery.
“In a complex economic environment, IT spending is constantly under scrutiny. IT organisations are being asked to show the value they are delivering to the organisation and how quickly that value is realised. To that end, they are looking for service management products that are well integrated and can be implemented quickly. At the same time, customers want to be able to deploy components at their own pace based on urgency and budgets,” said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates, an industry analyst firm.
“CA is changing the way IT service management solutions are delivered by making yesterday's products into today's integrated features and providing clear incremental integration paths to more complete service management,” said Patrick Price, Principal Consultant, Service Management Practice at CA Africa. “We are removing some significant buying and implementation obstacles that have hindered many IT service management organisations from both quickly achieving time-to-value and reaching their strategic goals of delivering and supporting services to meet business objectives.”
CA is helping businesses accelerate their IT service management deployments and IT services adoption by delivering:
* Unified product offerings: CA has made it easier for customers to attain more complete and integrated IT service management capabilities, and ITIL process support. By unifying important IT service management capabilities into three unified products that support service desk management, client management and asset management, CA is helping lower the total cost of ownership of an entire service management solution. In addition, CA is providing incremental implementation paths for each product to give its customers the means for faster initial implementation and time-to-value. Streamlining the features under one product also supports a single product licence versus multiple product licences to get more complete IT service management capabilities. The three products and their unified capabilities include:
* CA Service Desk Manager - helps optimise the support of core business services while improving staff efficiency by automating tasks and process flows across incident, problem, knowledge, change and configuration (CMDB) processes. (See today's related announcement for information on the next planned release.)
* CA IT Client Manager - helps increase the efficiency and security of desktops, laptops and devices by automating the end-to-end processes needed to manage them. CA IT Client Manager provides comprehensive automation capabilities in a single product for inventory, tracking, maintenance, O/S and personality migration, patch management, analytics and decision-support across all enterprise client devices.
* CA IT Asset Manager - provides visibility and control of IT assets throughout their lifecycle to help reduce costs, mitigate risks and support compliance initiatives. CA IT Asset Manager enables essential business functions such as requisition contract, vendor, software licence and financial management across the enterprise IT asset base.
* CA EITM business service integrations: Through a combination of pre-built software integrations that cross traditional IT organisation and tool boundaries and implementation services provided by CA Services, CA is helping customers rapidly deploy important business processes and IT services for faster time to value. Two new business service integrations, announced today, have been developed as service offerings ready to be implemented and deployed within an organisation.
* Identity and Access Management as an Automated Service is based on CA Service Catalogue and CA Identity Manager to help further automate and simplify the fulfilment of identity and access management-related service requests using CA service management tools. Integrating business technologies such as identity and access management into a service management framework helps lower costs and reduce errors by providing organisations with a single point of contact for the delivery of IT services.
* Manage Infrastructure as an IT Service, which integrates CA CMDB with CA NSM (formerly CA Unicentre Network and Systems Management) and CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager, is designed to help customers deal with infrastructure management complexity by providing a complete 360-degree view of related services. By automatically populating CA CMDB with configuration items and relationships from the management tools, organisations are able to “see” what supports an IT service and what business process that service supports. It helps customers understand the impact a change on a system will have to a service and it also improves service availability by reducing mean-time-to-repair due to a deeper understanding of the relationships among infrastructure and service components.
CA Green Books: CA Green Books are online publications available to CA customers to help them accelerate the value of their IT investment by offering real-world solution scenarios and experience focused on:
* Implementation and deployment best practices, including integration across multiple CA products.
* Sample environment setups and configurations
* Instructions to perform implementation tasks including recommendations and the rationale behind choosing various options and configurations.
* CA Deployment Playbooks for IT Service Management: CA Deployment Playbooks, including Rapid Implementation Services Offerings, offer a consistent and proven step-by-step approach that CA Services and eventually CA Partners can use to deploy various CA IT service management solutions from design to final training in customer environments. Backed by CA's more than 30 years of experience helping businesses manage their IT systems, CA Deployment Playbooks were created to help CA Services implement CA technology using tested methods designed to help customers quickly see business value from their IT investment within 60 to 90 days of initiating a project. Rapid Implementation Services Offerings further increase the value realised by offering this implementation methodology at a fixed price - reducing the chance of unexpected escalating costs. The IT service management areas that CA Deployment Playbooks currently support include incident/problem management, IT client management, and IT asset management.
* CA Productivity Accelerator for CA Service Desk Manager: Created to reduce the time it takes for end-user adoption of CA Service Desk Manager, CA offers an automated content development platform which helps organisations create and publish documentation, training and support aids in a single development session. From business process documents and user manuals to online simulations published to an HTML Web site or learning management system, organisations can create and publish content in a wide variety of formats with just one development effort.
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