CA narrows focus on cloud, security, and DevOps management

CA Technologies has announced it is committed to building software solutions to help businesses focus on the application economy. The software giant has launched a number of solutions on Monday that focus on three areas: Management cloud, DevOps, and security.

CA Technologies chief technology officer John Michelsen told ZDNet that these areas of focus are necessary for organisations to take into consideration when they are looking to build their own application.

"We're trying to accomplish to be, for our customers, the best resource for helping them build their own applications, deliver those applications their customers, partners, and employees, and allow them to operate them effectively," he said.

"We think it's an application economy, and the only way to communicate with customers is through applications."

CA Technologies' Cloud Service Management (CSM) is a software-as-a-service-based service desk solution aimed at eliminating the need for big development teams and long customisation and development cycles. The solution, which is now available for a free trial, has been enhanced with CA Release Automation and Puppet Enterprise, and it provides customers' connection to third-party applications, such as Dropbox.

"Our cloud SaaS-based service desk product is now going to let us convert really well. We have a try and buy, so you can go online and get access to it very easily. We think [CSM] is really going to help us and help our customers to remove a lot of costs at operating service desk and be much more responsive," Michelsen said.

Additionally, CA Technologies has announced its Enterprise Mobility Management product featuring the company's Smart Contanerisation technology, which enables organisations to have unified management over mobile applications, devices, email, and content.

Also launched on Monday was Application Lifecycle Conductor, a lifecycle management solution that automates and manages application development across different environments, from mobile to mainframe, and at different stages of the application lifecycle, including from the initial service desk ticket to deployment. The launch of Application Lifecycle Conduct comes after CA Technologies' recent acquisition of SCN Solutions.

In DevOps, CA Technologies has introduced Service Virtualization 8.0 with API management to help customers deliver applications faster. CA has also introduced the Release Automation 5.5 to drive the delivery of multi-tiered application deployments.

Other additional enhancements to the CA DevOps solutions announced on Monday include Agile Parallel Development to help teams within a business work in parallel instead of waiting on other teams to finish their components or for resources to become available, as well as the CA Mobile App Analytics.

Michelsen said that the Mobile App Analytics solution will give enterprises — particularly those operating worldwide that are connected to several network providers — the opportunity to identify any problems, including those that are outside of the control of IT organisations, such as bandwidth or carrier issues, and solve them easier.

According to CA Technologies, using CA's DevOps solutions, customers have already reported significant improvements in productivity of up to 60 percent, development speeds of between 25 percent and 50 percent, and a reduction in manual deployment effort by up to 15 times.

Michelsen said that the enhancements the company has made to the DevOps portfolio are to reflect the demand within the space.

"With DevOps, there's a lot going on; it's all about compressing the development cycle, it's about removing complexities, and it's about development testing and operating the software, and we have the capabilities already," he said.

On the security front, CA Technologies has expanded its API management solutions with CA API Developer Portal as a SaaS offering. It will allow businesses to open data as APIs, and create, test, deploy, manage, and publish applications. Organisations will also be able invoice directly from the portal, which will mean easier pricing of API assets. At the same time, the company has claimed that the solution will accelerate mobile and web application delivery, and improve customer engagements with frictionless access.

The launch of the API Developer Portal follows CA Technologies' acquisition of API management and security firm Layer 7 last year, which Michelsen said the company has "done a lot of work" to integrate since. At the time, CA Technologies said it saw the privately held company as complementary to its DevOps products.

CA has also enhanced its Mobile API Gateway with a software development kit, including end-user experience improvements to simplify access for mobile users across all applications — mobile, hybrid, and web.

CA Mobile API Gateway has also been integrated with Samsung Knox Workspace, a mobile security solution developed by Samsung for Android devices to give enterprises the opportunity to use and build secure apps. At the same time, the integration between the two solutions offers Samsung Knox customers single sign-on, as well as control over app access to the enterprise APIs and third-party apps.

"Our technology focuses on identity and access management, who has the access to this data and are they authenticated, and are we making sure that we don't give inappropriate access to people," Michelsen said.

"We've traditionally been a leader in this space, we're making major enhancements to our secure cloud, a cloud-based identity access system, and we have focused over the last year heavily in API management. If you think about it, it's not only people that access resources of data anymore; now, more and more applications themselves, so security endpoint management is a very important aspect."

Aimee Chanthadavong has travelled as a guest of CA Technologies to CA World '14.