Las Vegas – CA Technologies Cloud-Connected Management Suite is intended to address the market demand for speed.
And, for the most part, CA will enable its channel partners to be the main delivery option for the Cloud-Connected Suite.
The suite comprises four products: Cloud Insight, which will leverage the Service Management Index (SMI) that was announced yesterday as part of www.cloudcommons.com consortium for assessing cloud services that match business priorities;
Cloud Compose is a product that builds a cloud from commodity-based hardware that will be managed from reusable components;
Cloud Optimize similar to Insight will use SMI for getting the most out of current infrastructure to help in lowering operational costs; and
Cloud Orchestrate is for workflow control and policy-based automation derived from Insight, Compose and Optimize products.
While this suite is currently not available, it will build upon technology from 3Tera, Oblicore and Cassatt, three recent acquisitions, said Chris O‘Malley, executive vice- president of Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line for CA.
General availability for Insight and Compose is slated for end of October. Optimize will be made available in April of 2011 and that will be followed by Orchestrate a month later.
Cloud-Connected Management Suite is a re-imagining of IT with an unlimited set of choices, according to O’Malley. “We have users making decisions without IT. If someone wants to implement a cloud-based marketing tool they just add it online and solve the problem. This is a rapidly deployable solution that does not need new hardware or software so they don’t need the IT department,” O’Malley said.
The only downside to provide this kind of speed to market through the cloud O’Malley added is that business and organizations could end up with fragmentation.
The market focus for CA’s new cloud product will be the IT supply chain. CA claims its new cloud suite will be able to manage and secure supply chain resources in a common manner that can respond quicker to changing business needs such as lowering costs and stretching IT’s value.
“IT faces a stark choice to add value or become less relevant,” O’Malley said.
Another challenge for CA will be in addressing its go-to-market direction with the channel. O’Malley said that historically CA’s channel has been on the storage side, but that the cloud is a new space for the company and admittedly its does not have a strong channel play currently.
O’Malley did say that the new Cloud-Connected suite will help solution providers and managed service providers (MSP) add value. CA did pick up 350 MSPs in the 3Tera buy and NimSoft gave CA many quality channel partners who know how to do Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms.
“What we are trying to do is be smart about what we know how to do and not know how to do. We will adopt all those good things from 3Tera and NimSoft’s channel programs and be more aggressive with the MSPs. MSPs are creating a viable business and with CA’s cloud products they will become even more important in the market place over time as they take over the IT staff and the data centre. This trend with MSPs will increase over time and they will be critical for our success in this space,” O’Malley said.
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