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CA Strengthens PPM Leadership With Clarity 8 To Support Comprehensive It Governance


WEBWIRE

New Capabilities Provide Portfolio View of IT Services, Financial Metrics, Business Alignment and Operational Controls

ISLANDIA, N.Y., October 9, 2006 – CA (NYSE: CA) today introduced CA Clarity 8, a major new version of its industry-leading Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) system. Clarity 8 delivers the foundation for comprehensive IT governance by providing a single system for the strategic planning and financial control of IT services—maximizing IT’s ability to align budgets and resources with business needs, while minimizing the risk of inadequate controls across the enterprise. This broad governance functionality helps deliver on CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision of unifying and simplifying IT in support of business objectives.

To engage with their internal customers in business terms, CIOs must broaden their perspective beyond individual projects to the services that their IT organizations provide. Unlike traditional PPM systems, Clarity 8 delivers this essential perspective by providing a portfolio view of IT services, financial metrics, business alignment, and operational risks and controls.

“Like every part of our business, IT must be highly diligent in its approach to returning value to the organization and to our shareholders,” said Myrna Soto, vice president - Business Solutions and Project Management Office at MGM Mirage. “By providing detailed insight into service costs and resource allocation, we expect Clarity 8 will help us exercise this essential diligence and enable us to achieve significant cost recovery for our entire IT organization.”

Four new components in Clarity 8 enable fact-based collaborative decision-making between business executives and IT:

* CA Clarity IT Portfolio Manager features a real-time CIO dashboard that provides visibility into the total cost of each business service, aggregating all the components required to deliver that service—including assets, applications, people, projects, and ongoing support. This comprehensive “bill of materials” enables side-by-side comparisons of IT investments and helps ensure alignment of those investments with business priorities.
* CA Clarity IT Financial Manager facilitates budgeting, forecasting, cost tracking and cost recovery for IT services and their components by generating accurate pro forma invoices and detailed chargebacks based on cost and utilization. It integrates with other CA applications, such as Unicenter Asset Portfolio Management and Unicenter Service Desk, to facilitate implementation of highly effective IT financial management.
* CA Clarity Business Relationship Manager delivers an IT services portal that provides executive-level visibility into current technology demand and delivery—including service performance and costs and major project milestones.
* CA Clarity Risk and Controls Manager, a solution pack that includes the CobiT® and Unified Compliance Project frameworks, provides centralized management of risks and regulatory controls such as those for HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (see related release).

Clarity 8 also includes more than 150 enhancements in core PPM functionality, including richer project planning, better resource management, more flexible workflow definition, and continued deepening of Clarity’s point-and-click configurability.

CA also introduced the “30 Days to Clarity” starter implementation package to help customers accelerate their time-to-value. This fixed-price service offering takes the risk out of initial PPM deployment.

“The insights that Clarity 8 provides transform the engagement between IT and the business,” said Carl Landers, vice president of marketing for CA’s Clarity product line. “This transformation is a critical competitive advantage in a world where the optimized application of IT services often determines the success or failure of corporate strategies.”

Clarity 8 will be available on October 31.

About CA Clarity

CA Clarity, the industry-leading PPM solution, enables IT organizations to achieve world-class performance by improving the quality of their engagement with the business and enhancing their ability to run at peak efficiency. The CA Clarity system features integrated portfolio planning, demand management, project management, resource planning and time and cost management. More than 600,000 users at 650 companies depend on CA Clarity to govern IT and, increasingly, to manage new product development. More information about CA Clarity is available at http://ca.com/clarity.

About CA

CA (NYSE: CA), one of the world’s largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., and serves customers in more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com.

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Copyright © 2006 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.



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