CA Emphasizes Holistic Enterprise IT Management

CA is refocusing its widely varied selection of enterprise software around a new theme: enterprise IT management, including managing the virtualized environment.

Long known for its CA-Unicenter systems management software and other products, CA is now focused on enabling customers to "govern, manage, and secure their IT environments," said Roger Pilc, senor VP and general manager of the data center automation and infrastructure management business unit. In support of enterprise IT management, CA launched three new products and enhanced five existing ones on Monday.

"Five of these eight solutions are targeted at managing the enterprise's risk posture," said Pilc.

Of the new products, two of them, CA Software Compliance Manager and CA Security Compliance Manager, are aimed at ensuring compliance with security and software management mandates. Both were developed in-house by CA, a departure from its frequent acquisition strategy of previous years.

Software Compliance Manager is designed to keep IT organizations in step with their software license requirements and manage the risk of ineffective software license implementation. Licenses are often adhered to through manual processes and on an individual judgment basis. "You don't want someone running an audit and realize you've exceeded your Microsoft license allowance by 20%," requiring a firm to pay an unexpected extra amount to its supplier to stay in compliance, said Pilc in an interview.CA has applied for a patent to cover the rules and policies it's built into Software Compliance Manager, along with its compliance engine, which matches a running software asset to its license requirements. The compliance tool also administers licenses by recording license information, capturing ownership, maintenance, and dependency information and updating a license knowledgebase, Pilc said.

Software Compliance Manager will be available within several months. Its pricing will be based on the number of software assets that it's managing. No example of pricing was immediately available.

Security Compliance Manager helps an IT organization automate processes to answer simple questions, such as "Who has access to what data and applications? Who Can do what? Who approved what?" The tool collects information from a variety of identity systems to address those questions and helps an organization detect security policy or compliance violations and initiate remedies, Pilc said.

The new security tool also identifies orphan or inactive user accounts that represent departed employees or contractors. The tool is available immediately at a price of $25 per user for up to 5,000 users.

The third new product is CA IT Process Manager, available immediately, for designing and implementing IT processes, sometimes referred to as the IT run book or the documented way of doing processes the correct way each time. Making IT processes better documented and more consistent is a key element of the IT Infrastructure Library, the best practices published the government of the United Kingdom.IT processes can be designed with the help of templates, which provide rule-based workflows that can implement a process across multiple systems. The Process Manager can connect processes to underlying CA software, such as job schedulers, workload automation, and online application health monitoring. It can also connect processes to non-CA systems management tools from IBM, BMC, HP, and Microsoft. It connects to over 30 IT management software products in all, said Pilc.

It can automate such key processes as workload scheduling, configuring new servers and software, and disaster recovery. IT Process Manager is price by bundle, based on size of deployment. The base package starts around $100,000.

CA also updated Access Control Premium Edition, which offers reporting on an organization's compliance with user access controls and policies. In the past, access control has consisted of setting policies, then reporting after the fact on events that might violate those policies. Access Control allows an IT staff "to streamline policy deployment across a large variety of systems," said Pilc. It is available immediately and is priced at $7,200 per server for 25 servers.

CA Identity Manager also was updated. It manages user identities across mainframe, x86, and Web environments. It can determine who has access to what for a variety of applications, and has been updated to be able to report on proof of end user compliance. It has been simplified to reduce deployment time. It is priced at $50 per user for up to 5,000 employees, or $4 per user for external Web applications, and will be available within several months.

CA Governance, Risk and Compliance Manager 1.5 is a risk management application for audit, compliance and IT risk professionals. The latest release allows an organization to correlate business policies, such as serving the highest revenue producing customers first, with performance data and risk indicators. If HIPAA regulation compliance is being put at risk by bad practices or poor performance, GRC Manager can provide an alarm, Pilc said. GRC Manager 1.5 will debut at CA World Nov. 16-21 in Las Vegas and will be priced on a per user basis with deals averaging $250,000.CA Advanced Systems Management release 11.2 expands CA's ability to centrally manage virtual machines through integration with VMware's Virtual Center. It also can manage the logical domains of Sun Microsystems Solaris 10 Containers, which subdivide a physical server's resources into multiple logical units under one host copy of Solaris. ASM 11.2 can map virtual resources to the physical ones on which they depend. ASM also supports logical partitioning on IBM's System p5 Power servers. The management product is currently available and priced at $1,908, with an addition charge for each resource, such as CPU or Gbyte of memory, being managed.

CA OPS/MVS Event Management Automation release 11.6 is a mainframe z/OS automated management application that now includes Switch Operations Facility, which allows mainframe administrators to visualize, monitor and manage complex, clustered systems. It can proactively perform health checks that compare operational levels to defined policies, and make corrections if needed. It is priced at $48,495 for the base product.