CA Technologies Adds To Security, DevOps And Management Product Portfolios

CA Technologies significantly bolstered its product portfolio this week, debuting new software in its key DevOps, agile management, security and mainframe technology areas.

The unveilings at this week's CA World '15 conference in Las Vegas are the fruits of the New York-based company's efforts to step up its product line expansion efforts. In June, the company hired Otto Berkes from HBO to be CA's chief technology officer and in July hired Ayman Sayed from Cisco as chief product officer.

"CA is becoming more relevant to the discussion and CA's products more top of mind because the app economy is changing the focus from the IT department to the line of business," Sayed said in an interview with CRN.

[Related: CA Technologies Plans Two-Year Channel Program Overhaul]

The announcements also come in the midst of CA's two-year effort to overhaul its partner program, an initiative revealed at last year's CA World, and to increase sales through the channel.

In April, the company launched a comprehensive market development fund program for partners -- the company's first -- and began operating under a new set of rules of engagement with partners, said Alyssa Fitzpatrick, senior vice president of CA's worldwide partner organization, in a pre-CA World interview.

More recently, CA has implemented new certification and accreditation programs for partners. The vendor also has been surveying partners to better understand how they engage with the company and gauge the effectiveness of the partner program changes.

"I do absolutely feel we're trending in the right direction," Fitzpatrick said. While the company continues to recruit new partners, Fitzpatrick said the emphasis is on doubling-down on current partners who are investing in their CA relationship.

Sayed noted that the new products introduced this week create more opportunities for channel partners in IT management, DevOps and security. While CA's product portfolio has traditionally been heavy on products for IT departments within large companies, Sayed said the new products are more "lightweight" and appropriate for SMBs and line-of-business managers. "And that means our partners have a greater role to play," Sayed said.

CA updated its identity-centric security portfolio this week with a new release of CA Privileged Access Manager for protecting VMware NSX accounts. The CA Identity Suite software has been updated with a new user interface, and the newly unveiled CA Data Content Discovery software is a tool for finding and classifying sensitive mainframe data.

CA Privileged Access Manager is based on software CA acquired in August when it bought Xceedium.

IT security is on the minds of many business executives, given the number of highly publicized security breaches businesses and government agencies suffered in recent years, Sayed noted.

The new CA Privileged Access manager "complements VMware NSX to control, monitor and audit privileged user activity," said Carol Rivetti, president at Affigent, a Herndon, Va.-based solution provider that serves the federal government market. The CA software builds on the VMware NSX native security capabilities to control privileged user access and activity, she said in a statement, and enables granular operator privileges and workloads running in a VMware NSX environment.

CA also made several additions and improvements to its DevOps product portfolio. CA Unified Infrastructure Management for z Systems provides IT managers with a unified view across mainframe and distributed systems. CA Virtual Network Assurance, the latest addition to the company's Agile Operations products, is designed for monitoring physical and virtual network stacks based on software-defined networks/network function virtualization technology. And CA Service Utilization, a toolset for simulating and testing newly developed applications, is now available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

The expanded agile management product portfolio includes software from Rally, a provider of agile development technology that CA acquired in July and has renamed CA Agile Central. The product line also includes CA Project & Portfolio Management, and the company unveiled a new release of that software that's integrated with CA Agile Central.

PUBLISHED NOV. 19, 2015