Las Vegas – This year’s CA World is the second time in the last three events where CA augmented its corporate name. Company CEO Bill McCracken announced to the more than 7,000 attendees that CA will now be called CA Technologies.
The former IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) PC boss also revealed CA’s cloud strategy, which will be to bring security to the cloud. A task that many analysts have said has stunted the cloud’s growth.
McCracken told the story about how CA talked about a switch from SAP to Salesforce.com on the cloud to solve its dilemma of providing company employees with sales data on a unified system across all of its geographies.
McCracken was short on specifics leaving that for the rest of the conference, but he was clear on CA’s go-to-market cloud strategy. CA will leave it up to the customer.
McCracken said that for CA if its on-premise or in a Software-as-a-Service model customers will be asking for different kinds of cloud services and that CA would be offering solutions either from a channel partner or managed service providers that add value or through internal direct sales.
“For us its going to be on premise or SaaS or both. It could affect our base. We know that but it will happen so we need to make it happen and that is one of the reasons why we bought Nimsoft. Customers decide. We will not decide for them,“ he said.
McCracken also said that virtualization will be an integral part of CA’s strategy. He said that to support cloud services customers need to virtualize first. CA announced three new programs for this line of business: Virtual Automation, Virtual Assurance and Virtual Configuration that will manage physical and virtual machines and help customers move from the glass house to the virtual world and eventually the cloud.
Before McCracken’s keynote address, CA announced Cloud Commons, an online community that CA created along with Carnegie Mellon to base cloud computing services. CA is sponsoring www.cloudcommons.com but will leave it independent and open. Laura McCluer, vice-president of cloud community for CA, said hopes to attract other vendors even competitors. The Islandia, N.Y.-based company announced that Red Hat has signed on along with Gartner Research, EMA and Forrester Research.
“Cloud computing is a huge market disruption and the issue is trying to address cloud computing as a competitive advantage and with all this confusion and hype that’s going to be hard to do,” she said.
For example, when piecing together Cloud Commons, CA found more than 3,000 cloud providers.
The Web site will mirror sites such as IMDB and Amazon.com where users will rate cloud services using a system called Service Management Index or SMI. SMI will rate available cloud services up to 100 being the best score possible; grading areas include Agility, risk, security, cost, capability and quality, said Jeff Purdue, senior scientist at Carnegie Mellon.
“We took the initial draft and trying to move it into an industry consortium of interested or link minded partners that maybe competitive but will work in a collaborative fashion for government and business. CA is a founding member, but they will not be the only member as we are looking for other members,” Purdue said.
Purdue added that there is a move towards more cloud centric services that appear to certain cost and quality benefits and Cloud Commons will work to quantify those through a set of standard industry definitions that can be measured.
As Cloud Commons went live Sunday night the company said the online community will have a spirit of independence and will not be about selling CA products.
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