CA Debuts Central Repository For IT Asset Management

Posted by K.C. Jones on January 25, 2006

CA has announced a new solution for managing and unifying financial oversight of technology assets.

CA's Asset Management r11 product suite leverages the company's strategic Integration Platform to help customers reduce costs, and optimize the technical, operational and financial performance of IT resources.

It merges IT asset management functions like discovery, inventory, licensing, vendor and contract management and budgeting for IT assets. It also provides decision-support analytics for all asset categories, CA Business Service Optimization Unit Product Management Director Allan Andersen said in an interview Tuesday.

The suite underpins CA's boarder Enterprise IT Management vision of unifying and simplifying management of enterprise-wide IT from planning to disposal. A flexible central management database is at the center of the asset management suite, providing organizations with greater control, automation and information they need to allocate resources within their IT budgets.

A new reconciliation engine ties together operational and financial characteristics of IT assets, reducing risk of exposure during a compliance audit. It tracks all aspects of a software license, including usage rights, payment history and purchase order numbers. It also tracks and categorizes asset-related costs.

By comparing software licenses with discovered software, using a signature database, the system helps ensure compliance. The system can detect, down to the patch level, the installation of new applications and marry that with how the software is licensed, Andersen said. It allows customers to understand if they are underutilizing or over utilizing software assets.

"This provides discovery and inventory of all hardware, software and usage of assets together with financial and contractual management of those assets," Anderson said. "You need to know what you have, how much you paid for it and when contracts are up. If you don't know that it's very, very difficult to manage IT. This gives a 360 point of view in assets."

The information is available enterprise-wide through a single repository and one web interface.

CA Asset Management integrates new and enhanced products, including Unicenter Asset Intelligence, Unicenter Asset Management and Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management.