CA Upgrades Unicenter Desktop DNA

CA partners said Unicenter Desktop DNA r11, announced last week, includes new features that should help them substantially boost sales of the product. The release comes amid an aggressive CA campaign to increase the number of partners selling the product to several thousand from fewer than 100. Pricing without volume discounts starts at $22 per node for 100 nodes; CA is planning a small-business edition for midyear release.

Valeh Nazemoff, director of business development for DataTech Enterprises, a CA partner in Fredericksburg, Va., said Unicenter Desktop DNA r11 supports the ability to do incremental backup of local data and system configurations, which will be particularly attractive to government buyers harboring classified data on desktop systems. "I expect this to be a big seller in 2005," she said. "The added features are really going to help."

DataTech is working on closing a Unicenter Desktop DNA deal in which thousands of desktop environments will be migrated to new systems, she said.

Tom Derosier, co-owner of CPU Guys, a custom-system builder in Hanson, Mass., praised the new release but said he is particularly interested in the forthcoming small-business version. "There is a need for a product like this in the small-business and consumer market," he said. "This is a big time-saver."

The r11 release, the first major upgrade since CA added Unicenter Desktop DNA when it acquired Miramar Systems last March, includes the ability to capture more incremental data from networked PCs, said Allan Andersen, director of product management at CA, Islandia, N.Y. This will allow VARs and network administrators to spend less time performing PC image migration, he said.

"If you are planning a very large [PC fleet] rollout, a week prior to the rollout an administrator can take a backup of the systems using DNA. Then, on the day you are doing the full job, you just have to run an incremental migration, only sending along the changes that have been made since the incremental, meaning a much lower load on the network and much less time spent," Andersen said.

Steven Burke contributed to this story.