CA Gets Into Hosted Services

Computer Associates is dipping its toes into the market for hosted services. On Monday, it said the latest version of its Web Services Distributed Management software will be offered in a hosted environment as well as well its traditional on-site implementation.

CA already has plans to unveil an additional product with a hosted option in the next two to three months and will monitor the reception of the hosted version of Web Services Distributed Management to help determine how big a plunge it will make, chief technology officer Yogesh Gupta said in making the announcement at CAWorld 2004 in Las Vegas. "We can create additional products where we don't need a physical footprint," Gupta said. "We believe there are certain products where that approach would be very reasonable."

In addition to providing customers with an option to on-site installations of its software, CA can use hosted services to expand its partner programs with outsourcers such as EDS, he said.

No companies are as yet signed up for the hosted Web Services Distributed Management platform, Gupta said. The hosted offering isn't expected to necessarily have lower up-front costs, but would likely have a lower total cost of ownership.

Customers can now register their Web services to be monitored and managed by Web Services Distributed Management, which reports events and performance results back to customers.Businesses are increasingly migrating to service-oriented architecture-based environments to leverage infrastructure investments and deliver services to users within and beyond the enterprise. These loosely coupled services are creating new management challenges, since they're not hard-wired to specific enterprise infrastructure elements as are client-server applications, Gupta said. Web Services Distributed Management 3.1 addresses the challenges by automatically discovering services and their dependencies, while providing the reporting and altering functions to ensure best-practices monitoring and troubleshooting, he said.

Key features of the new release are support for a range of platforms and protocols, centralized management with advanced reporting and predictive analysis capabilities, automatic service detection and cataloging, and a Observer Development Kit to ease integration with third-party solutions.