CA Puts Muscle Behind On-Demand Computing Plans With Four New Products

Available now, the new products include BrightStor Process Automation Manager, for automating the allocation and provisioning of storage resources, and eTrust Vulnerability Manager, for discovering potential security weaknesses in IT environments.

CA also introduced two new Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) products for VMware Software's server virtualization software: Unicenter NSM Option for VMWare Software, which monitors virtual machine environments on Intel-based Linux and Windows platforms, and Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option, for managing and dynamically provisioning VMware virtual machines.

All four products will be sold through solution providers, though CA has limited its Unicenter network management channel sales to a small group of partners and is placing the bulk of its emphasis in the channel on its BrightStor storage, eTrust security and AllFusion data modeling product lines, said CA Chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar during a press conference.

Kumar said there is a strong correlation between CA's on-demand strategy and the revamped North American channel partner program the vendor launched here today that adds aggressive rebates, expanded lead generation and free training, certification and technical support for qualified partners.

"[The on-demand strategy] is one of the reasons that our new channel partner program encourages partners to work across multiple product lines," Kumar said.

On-demand computing should provide customers with improved efficiency as well as potential long-term cost savings, said Charles Swanger, national practice director, enterprise solutions and storage, at Sarcom, a systems integrator in Lewis Center, Ohio.

"It's all about the management of resources where they are never static--they're always in use," Swanger said.

The new products utilize components of Sonar, the code name for CA's group of patent-pending technologies it introduced Sunday for automatically mapping IT infrastructure to a customer's business.

Sonar components will appear in many new management products the company is developing and, in fact, already exist in some current products, though the company has not branded the collection of technologies until now, Kumar said.

CA previously introduced six Unicenter products to support the launch of its on-demand computing strategy in April.