Barrenechea: CA Aiming For Pervasive Network Management

Amplifying this mantra, CA executives on Sunday outlined the company's latest vision for helping manage network and computing resources in a manner more closely aligned with actual business processes.

Describing CA's strategy during a press conference at CA World in Las Vegas, Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development for CA, Islandia, N.Y., also preannounced the availability of a CA management bundle for Microsoft Exchange environments and showed off a new, more pastel-colored Unicenter user interface.

CA's broad IT network management vision subscribes to the notion that you must account for every piece of hardware and software on a network. To achieve this, Barrenechea said CA will evolve Unicenter into a model that has a centralized management database (MDB) wrapped around a set of common IT services that extend out to every component of a network.

The MDB and common services framework will integrate outward to bring network operations, storage, security and life-cycle management under one management console, regardless of the number or type of third-party vendor products on the network, Barrenechea said.

"Once you know your assets, you can begin to manage them," he said.

CA's holy grail is to offer a business-oriented view of an IT network via Unicenter Service Management tools that reflect actual IT budgets for individual departments all the way down to specific application use, e-mail use, and other IT services.

The battle is about combatting ongoing network complexity, Barrenechea said. CA's inclusion of open-source technology in many upcoming announcements this week, its ongoing support of mainframe environments, service management efforts and realtime infrastructure response--all coupled with increased asset utilization--will bring about "the ultimate destination where capacity is dynamically sourced," he said.

Barrenechea said IT service management represents a "new market for CA," and he emphasized the importance of getting to a point where the financial management of IT can be better budgeted for and planned--even integrated into a company's ERP system.

When it comes right down to it, Barrenechea said, CA's vision of applying automation to monitoring and reporting on all aspects of the IT network, and connecting down into third-party platforms belonging to vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, to name just a few, marks the start of an era in which administrators can explore new ways of optimizing network assets and performance.

"As you deploy more automation, you can really begin to ask questions about the network," he said.

This rang true for Ken Schwartz, CIO and security practice leader for Western New York Computing Systems, a managed service provider and CA partner attending CA World. "The biggest part of managing the network is management of all IT," Schwartz said. "Think about it. You have people in certain departments adding their own cell phones, pagers, mobile network devices. Even some of the cell phones need their own antivirus protection, but if you don't know they are on the network, then what? So any tool I can get to help control what goes on the network, I'll take."

Pointing out CA's new toned-down user interface, which has a lighter, pastel feel, Barrenechea demonstrated an important component of CA's network management vision dubbed Unicenter Asset Intelligence. The tool offers tailored views based on business objectives and breaks down device reporting views by hardware, software, organizations and assets. Granular information pertaining to the taxonomy of various network elements, such as operating system or vendor, can also be listed.