CA Southern Africa announced that yesterday, in Las Vegas, CA World 2013 commenced with the inaugural keynote address, by CA Technologies CEO, Mike Gregoire, where he challenged the 5 000 attendees to embrace disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobile, social and big data management analytics to transform business and drive competitive advantage.
"Value is no longer measured by the size of the IT staff, the computing power (MIPs) under management or the square footage of your data centres," said Gregoire. "IT's value today is all about providing the innovation, speed, insight and security the business needs to gain a competitive advantage - using resources from both inside and outside your company. This creates a huge opportunity for CIOs and other IT leaders to act as a catalyst and enable modern business models and methods - to not only transform IT, but to transform the business. The question you have to ask yourself is this: Will I drive the change, or will I be driven by it?"
Boundaries of the data centre have expanded
Gregoire described an IT world where more and more systems, data and applications exist outside data centres - and outside firewalls - producing additional challenges and demands.
"First, it raises the stakes for IT management and security across this vast new landscape," he said. "They become even more important as you manage and secure your infrastructure, data, applications and business services across your existing environment and private, public and hybrid clouds. Second, it creates both a challenge and an opportunity for CIOs."
Focus on enabling technologies
In his keynote, Gregoire also highlighted CA Technologies' focus on four technology trends that will enable its customers to deliver and orchestrate IT with greater impact on business: DevOps, mobility, SaaS (software as a service) and big data analytics management.
DevOps: The need for speed
Gregoire said the communication, integration and collaboration between software application developers and IT operations professionals - commonly called DevOps - is vital if companies wish to transform their business models in order to deliver services to the market faster.
"The demand for applications today appears to be nearly insatiable. I ran across a reference recently that says it all - calling this new world 'The Planet of the Apps'", stated Gregoire. "The benefits of DevOps are not trivial. We believe our solutions can help you achieve as much as a 30% to 50% reduction in time to market... an 80% to 100% improvement in quality... and a 20% to 30% reduction in infrastructure costs."
Gregoire detailed CA Technologies' market-leading position in DevOps because of the company's service virtualisation capabilities, as well as its acquisition of continuous application delivery resources. These capabilities, coupled with CA's Cloud Management solution, enable customers to get applications in production more quickly, with higher reliability and less risk.
Mobile management: Launch of comprehensive solutions to embrace the mobile opportunity
The explosion of mobile devices is a big challenge for IT organisations, Gregoire said. While business is demanding more mobile applications to gain anytime access to corporate data, when it comes to the security of data, what users don't know, he said, can hurt them. While discrete products to manage devices are available today, they do not help manage the content and applications being deployed.
"True enterprise mobility management requires a comprehensive approach that extends beyond device management to include mobile application, content and services management," said Gregoire. "That's why we're launching a comprehensive solution for enterprise mobility management here at CA World, and extending our existing solutions to support the mobile enterprise."
Software as a service: A technology infrastructure and business model shift
Gregoire said CA Technologies will invest in software as a service (SaaS) delivery by product segment, with the ultimate goal of providing a suite of management and security functions delivered as a service.
"For most people, SaaS means moving applications to the public cloud," he said. "But I have a different point of view. To me, SaaS is more of a technology infrastructure and a business model shift. Ultimately, SaaS is a business model that enables us to provide better-quality code faster, deliver continuous innovation, meet your needs more rapidly and accurately, and help you deliver better business results in a public cloud, private cloud or behind a customer's firewall."
Data management analytics: More data, more problems
Massive amounts of data are not helpful without a means to mine and analyse the information for insight and business value, he said.
"The first challenge is to manage and secure all this data. The bigger the data, the bigger the challenge for management and security, and this is our sweet spot," said Gregoire. "We see a significant opportunity to use big data to make management and security more intelligent and to increase the business value we deliver. It's an emerging area for us, but one that's receiving a lot of development focus."
What's next for CA Technologies?
Gregoire said the market will see more emphasis from CA Technologies on organic innovation with a goal of differentiating everything the company does to deliver even more value to customers. That means innovation on the mainframe, innovation in distributed computing, and innovation in cloud management.
Additionally, he focused on the emphasis the company is putting on ensuring customer success. This includes investments in moving customers to newer versions of software and delivering "bankable" product roadmaps.
"Who better than CA to redefine IT management and security in this new world of cloud, social, mobile and big data and to define new markets like DevOps?" Gregoire said. "This takes a significant commitment to innovation and we are committed to this mission."
More than 5 000 IT professionals and customers from around the world are attending CA World in Las Vegas to hear about the latest trends, learn how to best leverage CA Technologies' products and solutions, and network with peers and industry thought leaders. The user conference kicks off today and ends on 24 April.
For more information on CA World 2013, including a full agenda and registration details, visit http://www.ca.com/caworld. To join the CA World community on the Web or your mobile device, visit: http://caworld.ca.com.
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