CA's Executive Solution Addresses IT-Business Gap

Designed for the increasingly mobile workplace, CA Executive Insight for Service Assurance (CA Executive Insight) is intended to change the way IT communicates with the business. It enables executives, business managers and knowledge workers to answer fundamental questions about the business, regularly monitor potential risks and make time-sensitive decisions that impact business results, says Mike Sargent, general manager, service assurance, CA Technologies.

"Executive Insight is all about simplicity, collaboration, mobility, self-service and business-optimized IT," he says. "It's really a dashboard solution that builds off the suite capabilities we have." Key capabilities include real-time metrics through CA Application Performance Management (APM) for insight into how IT services impact revenue generation, internal productivity and brand value; interactive dashboards for selecting, organizing and monitoring business indicators; and mobility support for iPhones, iPads, Android devices and laptops. Sargent says CA is working with RIM, and future versions of this product will support the Playbook tablet and smartphones.

This is just the beginning--CA's initial foray into providing an effective solution for executives, says Dennis Drogseth, VP, Enterprise Management Associates. "What I like and think is most important is to understand it from the design perspective. They're leveraging a layered approach, assimilating data from multiple sources ... and will be clearly expanding it to other areas. They have an extensible platform for assimilating different pieces of information and bringing it to a context to support executive decision makers that can range over time from C-level executives to line-of-business managers."

Drogseth says the layered approach is much more flexible, and the solution provides versatility, extensibility, mobility and adaptability. "It is a really great design point for moving into this space, but it is still early days."

The company has also enhanced CA APM (Version 9.1), its unified application, infrastructure and network performance solution that links business transaction performance to the dependent application, network and infrastructure component. CA says it monitors all Web and non-Web transactions in real time as they traverse the hybrid-cloud infrastructure (physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe) to proactively identify, diagnose and resolve problems before end users are affected and assure service-delivery levels meet business objectives.

In its latest Magic Quadrant for APM, Gartner has put CA in the Leader category, along with IBM, HP, Compuware, Quest, OpTier and Opnet. It's a $2 billion market that grew 15% from 2010, which was up 10% from 2009. Sargent says the company has invested heavily in the APM space, and has grown 425% since fiscal year 2008 and added 1,000 customers.

Key CA APM 9.1 features include Infrastructure-Aware Application Triage to expand visibility into dependent hybrid-cloud infrastructure components to quickly identify, diagnose and resolve transaction performance problems caused by networks, servers and databases; Private-Cloud Application Triage to expand visibility into virtual infrastructure to address transaction performance issues in private cloud environments; Network-Aware Application Triage to unify end user experience and network performance monitoring to deal with network-related transaction performance problems; and expanded support for Flex and non-Web applications.

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