CA Announces IT Service Management Solutions Linking Service Demand, Delivery and Support for Maximum Value at Minimal Cost

CA Solutions Enable Lean IT by Orchestrating “Just-In-Time” Service Delivery

ISLANDIA, N.Y.– CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA) today announced three newly enhanced Service Management solutions designed to lower the cost and risk of service change, delivery and support while optimizing IT resources for greater business value. CA Service Catalog r12, CA IT Client Manager r12 and CA Service Desk Manager r12.1 leverage automation to streamline processes and orchestrate just-in-time delivery of services to the business, and are among 13 new and enhanced products CA announced today that help CIOs achieve Lean IT by reducing waste, increasing productivity and improving the customer experience.

CA Service Catalog r12 and CA CMDB Integration

CA Service Catalog cuts through the complexity of IT, presenting business executives and end users with an interface for ordering services described in business terms supported by back-end workflow to orchestrate delivery of ordered services, track service consumption, account for costs and chargebacks, and provide for contracted service levels. This release of CA Service Catalog r12, available this week, integrates with CA CMDB and is designed to:

* Connect standardized services defined in the CA Service Catalog to the underlying assets needed to deliver the service. Service designers using CA Service Catalog can integrate service configuration information from CA CMDB to simplify and streamline just-in-time service provisioning workflows such as secure access to business applications, assets and software for end users, and new virtual resources in the data center.
* Associate the services in CA Service Catalog to CA CMDB Configuration Items, and align operational views of IT applications and infrastructure with a business view of contracted business services. This helps efficiently and accurately maintain service configuration information.
* Provide business-focused service information such as service descriptions, contracted service levels and service subscriber information to other IT management solutions through CA CMDB Web services federation. This helps change managers understand business impact and risk of proposed changes to services, while service desk staff can quickly see the impact to users by a service issue.

“During our beta test period, we integrated CA Service Catalog with CA CMDB and it helped us speed service delivery and provisioning to get our team up and running more quickly with the capabilities they need to be productive,” said Harry Butler, Information Technology project manager at Elbit Systems of America, an international defense electronics company. “Because we had a clear view of what items are involved in delivering a service, we were able to design our service delivery model and workflows to be more effective.”

Federated Change and CA Service Desk Manager r12.1

Enterprises struggle with a natural tension between the need for change, risk and compliance controls at the central enterprise level and the need for speed and specialized tools at the local IT domain levels. These conflicting needs often result in an IT service disruption.

CA Service Desk Manager r12.1, planned for release this quarter, will help provide a balance between central governance and local control by providing service-level visibility and risk analysis across multiple domain-specific change tools ranging from mainframe and distributed software to the data center and strategic projects as part of a Federated Change Management strategy.

Within a customer’s Federated Change Management strategy, CA Service Desk Manager r12.1 would act as a “manager of managers,” helping to provide a unified view of planned and detected changes across the enterprise and identify conflicts between domains that could risk service disruption to the business.

In addition, CA is expanding its customers’ service configuration visibility into the mainframe environment with the new CA CMDB Connector for z/OS®, available today. CA CMDB Connector for z/OS discovers and helps reconcile mainframe Configuration Items (CIs) and their dependencies with distributed CIs to provide a complete view of business applications and services across distributed and mainframe environments. CA CMDB Connector for z/OS also exploits IBM’s zIIP (System z® Integrated Information Processor) specialty processor to deliver greater computing capacity and throughput without requiring additional system hardware resources.

“As an end user of CA Service Desk Manager and a global IT outsourcer that uses it for our own customers, we have a unique perspective on CA’s IT service management technology,” said Mark Morgan, global CA practice manager, TechTeam Global. “The existing workflow capabilities of CA Service Desk Manager have helped us record a time savings of over 20 percent by streamlining all procedures for new employees as they join the company. After just a short preview of the capabilities in release 12.1, we anticipate similar benefits as it will help our Change Managers make informed decisions during the approval process and automatically determine if there are conflicts for the Configuration Items affected.”

PinkVERIFY™ Certification for CA Service Desk Manager

CA Service Desk Manager is PinkVERIFY certified on ITIL® V3 for the following seven processes: Incident, Problem, Change, Service Asset & Configuration, Service Level, Availability, and Release & Deployment. Pink Elephant’s PinkVERIFY is currently the only independent certification program worldwide to recognize software that supports the definitions and workflow requirements of specific IT service management processes. Service management tools considered for PinkVERIFY are objectively assessed by an experienced Pink Elephant consultant with the highest level of ITIL certification.

CA IT Client Manager r12

CA IT Client Manager helps customers maximize the value of their IT asset investments by identifying and optimizing underutilized servers and desktops, reducing unnecessary asset purchases, and driving down the administrative costs needed to maintain, migrate and support enterprise client devices.

A comprehensive, unified management solution, CA IT Client Manager is designed to automate routine tasks such as asset discovery and inventory, software distribution, remote desktop control, patch administration and desktop migration, while delivering advanced asset analytics for improved business decisions.

Available this quarter, CA IT Client Manager r12 will further enhance customers’ IT asset inventory capabilities, provide extended platform support and simplify desktop migration. It also will incorporate the previously announced Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) Scanner to help meet United States Government federal desktop configuration requirements. The FDCC Scanner has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and it helps with compliance demands by detecting and reporting changes or deviations from federal desktop configuration requirements.

“It was immediately evident during our testing of CA IT Client Manager r12 that these new features would have significant impact in our ability to efficiently track and manage our customers’ IT assets,” said Michael Netzband, senior consultant, Merkantis Business Solutions, an IT service management solution provider in Germany. “By incorporating multiple capabilities for managing an organization’s assets into one solution, CA will help us streamline our daily management tasks and optimize our IT resources, which is critical as we need to be sensitive to every operating expense in today’s economic climate.”

CA customers often work with solution providers or directly with CA Services on their CA Service Management implementations. Both offer expertise in IT service support, and the CA Services team leverages more than 30 years of deployment experience using various CA Deployment Playbooks for each Service Management engagement. The CA Deployment Playbooks help customers realize faster time-to-value with their CA solutions by outlining a repeatable and proven step-by-step approach that CA Services and eventually CA Partners can use to deploy CA Service Management solutions in customer environments.

Visit CA to learn more about these new versions of CA Service Catalog, CA IT Client Manager and CA Service Desk Manager and the other CA EITM solutions announced today to power Lean IT.