The Islandia, New York-based company has introduced a range of product enhancements to its Unicenter systems management platform to cope with the automated management of enterprise infrastructures based on business rather than technical requirements.

While HP and IBM have been focusing on on-demand, or utility, computing for some time with their hardware and software offerings, and Sun Microsystems Inc has also weighed in with its N1 vision, CA believes there is a gap between announced strategies and customer plans that it is in a position to exploit.

It’s not about us announcing another on-demand computing strategy, said CA’s chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar. We already have one too many. It’s about us saying we’ve got to get above the phrase and figure out how to make this work for customers.

The problem here we’re trying to solve for customers today is that a number of hardware companies, such as IBM, HP and Sun, have come out with on-demand computing visions and strategies, he added. They all talk in varying degrees about their hardware platforms and we now have been working with customers for over a year about what this means to them.

IBM, HP and Sun have all outlined far-reaching on-demand initiatives that seek to automate the usage and management of infrastructure resources, but Kumar believes that CA has a role to play in preparing customers for these initiatives.

Our job is to enable customers to go down the path of getting ready for this on-demand computing paradigm and getting some tools in place to make it a much easier transition, he said. One of the things we’re trying to address is getting customers used to the idea of taking infrastructure components and mapping them to business functionality to allow customers to logically pool those computing resources to take advantage of the common components in the infrastructure.

In comparison with the competition, CA’s approach to on-demand computing is much more akin to that of its systems management software rival BMC, which in April outlined its Business Service Management strategy to enable users to map IT assets to service levels and build dynamic models for managing infrastructure components based on business service levels.

CA hopes to prepare customers for on-demand computing through the addition of functionality to its Unicenter systems management suite. New additions include Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) 3.1, and the Unicenter NSM Dynamic Reconfiguration Option, as well as updates to the company’s Unicenter Software Delivery, Asset Management and ServicePlus Service Desk products.

According to the company, NSM 3.1 enables users to view the IT infrastructure based on the business services it supports, while the Reconfiguration Option adds the ability to monitor business service levels and automatically allocate additional capacity where required.

Software Delivery 4.0 delivers built-in self-healing and provisioning capabilities for applications and operating systems, while Asset Management 4.0 includes capabilities for multi-dimensional software and hardware asset management to give a view of enterprise computing resource usage.

Meanwhile, ServicePlus Service Desk 6.0 is designed to enable devices and applications to proactively and automatically interact with the help desk, according to CA, increasing levels of self-management. Also new is Unicenter Management for webMethods 3.0, which manages the performance and availability of webMethods alongside Unicenter NSM.

The six new CA products are available now or over the next two months and will be bolstered by new additions to the Unicenter product line, as well as the BrightStor storage management and eTrust security management suites over the coming months.

Kumar described CA’s on-demand computing announcements as the first step towards the first phase of computing on demand. He said that the company sees the first phase as being the delivery of internal computing resources as a utility, while the second phase will be the move towards community-based grid utility projects. I think that vision is a bit further off because it requires much greater levels of integration between partners, suppliers and customers, he added.

Source: Computerwire