Management Toolkit

CA's Sanjay Kumar: We'll manage on-demand

Published: 30 Apr 2003 16:16 BST

Computer Associates chairman and chief executive Sanjay Kumar has the prevailing winds at his back. He is betting that the latest trend of delivering computing resources on-demand -- stirred up by companies like IBM, HP and Sun -- will expand the market for the company's flagship Unicenter network management products.

Yesterday, Kumar announced CA's "Managing on-Demand" strategy at the Networld+Interop (N+I) conference and exhibition in Las Vegas.

As you might expect, Kumar's message is that the best way to gain better utilisation of resources is through IT management, not just technology. "Managing on-demand computing ensures that businesses can rise above the IT fray and access computing as easily as flipping a switch," Kumar said in his keynote at N+I.

"What you want is a system that has the ability to recognise -- dynamically and automatically -- what resources are being used to handle order processing, identify which resources are at capacity, scour the enterprise for resources that could be redeployed to assist in order processing, and configure them to handle the task. And you need all that to occur in a matter of hours -- or better yet -- minutes."

CA's initiative is centred on a world in which standards, Web services, and evolutionary changes to the Unicenter product family play key roles. The company introduced six new Unicenter products yesterday that leverage extensions to CA Common Services, which includes capabilities such as business process mapping to IT resources and self-management features.

Leading the product parade is Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM) Version 3.1, which provides data integration services for aggregating management information and a way for IT managers to view the IT infrastructure based on the services it supports. The two features provide a flexible foundation for managing resources on-demand, as they are reallocated to address various business needs.

Unicenter Management for webMethods 3.0 manages the performance and availability of webMethods and works in concert with Unicenter NSM to associate applications and individual infrastructure components with the business process they support.