CA

CA Technologies today announced new products in the CA DevOps portfolio that drive business agility and competitive advantage through simplified and faster development and test, and through deeper network visibility

New CA API Management products accelerate API creation and mobile app development, while CA Service Virtualization – now available via Microsoft® Azure™ Marketplace – streamlines application simulation and test. The comprehensive portfolio also includes two new, organically developed monitoring solutions: CA Virtual Network Assurance, that gives operations teams industry-first assurance for dynamic virtual networks and legacy infrastructure, and CA Unified Infrastructure Management for z Systems, the only unified infrastructure management solution to provide comprehensive visibility of services that span mobile-to-mainframe systems in a single view.

While recently thumbing through some old comic books, I got a laugh from all the quirky advertisements. Fantastic promotions of awesome gadgets – like x-ray specs and radio wrist watches. Each designed to extract a gullible kid’s hard earned allowance. Of course they were all too good to be true and probably left many kids disappointed — and maybe like me, just a tad cynical.

I spied one ad that actually got me thinking about DevOps. It’s the famous “kick sand in your face” strip, which to those unfamiliar offered “98 pound weaklings” a sure fire program to build muscles, beat up bullies, and make lots of new friends down at the beach.

In IT we also have weakling apps we wish could be stronger. Services so brittle and fragile that any proposed change, update or enhancement is seen as risky – perhaps even career threatening.

CA channel chief Alyssa Fitzpatrick discusses technologies’ breadth of customers and depth of solutions.

Great code enables companies to better engage customers, make smarter decisions, and disrupt markets—or at least keep pace with disruptive competitors—while avoiding security and compliance risks. So boards have to worry about it.

Code is also a growing boardroom concern because of changing board demographics. Once upon a time, board members were vertical market veterans whose eyes glazed over when C-level executives came into the room talking technology. Nowadays, companies are recruiting tech-savvy board members who can provide strong strategic guidance for the digital marketplace.

This board-level engagement in all things DevOps poses a significant problem to senior IT executives. Historically, after all, IT leaders mostly had to just worry about explaining to the board what IT did.

To strike this tricky performance/compliance balance, Citrix and CA will integrate a set of complementary technologies, including hosting of federated identity and SSO, VPN, application acceleration, application firewalling and load balancing – all without the need for separate physical or virtual devices, according to officials from Citrix and CA.

Strong identity and access management is key to securing complex web properties and services, especially to address today’s needs for compliance and threat environments, according to Mike Denning, senior vice president and general manager of CA’s security business unit.  

On the role of software as a business enabler in today’s application economy, it’s clear that digital transformation has reached every aspect of business.

Put simply, CA Technologies findings claim that exploiting modern technology and communications to transform one or more key aspects of business to achieve a state of digital readiness has now become a mainstream activity to drive return on investment (ROI).

In revealing results of a global study, findings claim that in the application economy, businesses are moving at the “speed of light” to leapfrog their competition and accelerate the digital transformation of their organisation.

The study, Exploiting the Software Advantage: Lessons from Digital Disrupters, found that Digital Transformation is being driven as a coordinated strategy across a majority of organisations (55 per cent), with many projects underway in multiple areas of the company, including customer services, sales and marketing, and product/service development.

The preferred touch point of mobile device is compelling CIOs to transform their business into proactive software factories, says Stephen Miles, CTO APJ, CA Technologies.

As a result, ‘experience loyalty’ has taken precedence over ‘brand loyalty’, meaning if customers (or end- users) are unhappy with the app performance, they will have no qualms in leaving a brand and moving on to the next one. In response, businesses are pursuing digital transformation strategies by adding digital components to all of their products and services that not only enhances the user experience, but also provides alternate route to wider market segments.

To that effect, organizations are increasingly adopting DevOps to transform their businesses. While agile development and continuous delivery remains a top priority, IT operations teams are also aiming to become more agile, without sacrificing the operational stability that has been their claim to fame.

Operations groups have been managing and monitoring infrastructure and applications since the emergence of IT. But, with dynamic evolution of IT infrastructure and emergence of new application-based technologies, this task has become increasingly ubiquitous. Many enterprises are experiencing ‘are we in a maze?’ complex with their decades-old legacy systems. This leads to compromised user experience as well as lack of any visibility or control into business service performance, resulting in extended ‘mean-time-to-resolution’ (MTTR), and ultimately leading to the point of business experiencing an erosion of ‘experience loyalty’.