Computer Associates 2004 Annual Report Download - page 22

CA 2004 ANNUAL REPORT | PAGE 20
Using Technology to Succeed
With more than 20 percent of CA’s annual revenue
invested in research and development, we are
driving innovation in numerous technologies that
enable customers to better manage their IT
infrastructures and their businesses.
One way is through CA’s Enterprise Infrastructure
Management (EIM) software. CA’s EIM software
uses all of the Company’s major software brands
to automate IT operations, storage, security, and
life cycle and service management. This new
approach is complete, integrated and open.
Complete because it’s all that software customers
need to manage their infrastructures. Integrated
because it provides integrated data, processes
and user experiences. And open because CA
manages other management software, runs
cross-platform and operates in a hub-and-spoke
model when necessary to integrate existing
legacy software with CA software.
The foundation for EIM is a single management
database (CA MDB) that stores all management
information about assets, processes and people
across the enterprise. This piece is critical. After
30 years of IT and especially after the IT spending
frenzy of the ’90s, maintaining a complete IT
inventory has been difficult at best for most
companies. But if IT organizations don’t know
what they own, they can’t manage it, they can’t
secure it, they can’t back it up, they can’t wrap a
life cycle around it, and they can’t maximize its
availability and performance. Asset optimization
solves this problem. All assets, once discovered,
are governed by policies, are owned by people
or organizations, and are regulated by service
levels. CA is focused on delivering a complete
management database and the asset optimization
that organizations are seeking.
A specific technology CA has developed along
these lines is “Sonar.” Sonar uses “agentless”
patented and patent-pending intelligence
technology to discover which IT assets are
supporting which business processes and allows
companies to manage their infrastructures to
better serve the business. We are integrating Sonar
technology across all of our brands to provide a
sophisticated understanding of an entire network.
That’s powerful technology which is critical to
managing an IT infrastructure well.
So, too, are the Web services solutions CA is
developing. Web services are becoming an
integral part of the overall IT infrastructure.
They make it easier to integrate applications
and enable organizations to provide data and
services to customers and partners who are
outside the organization’s network. For example,
financial services organizations have used Web
services to deploy web applications that allow
their customers to access account information
and perform transactions, such as transferring
funds from one account to another. Manufacturing
firms and wholesalers can provide business
partners with data about inventory availability
and can allow them to place orders directly.
Offering this type of service has given companies
a competitive edge, while reducing their costs
and increasing efficiencies because customers
can perform their own transactions at any time
without having to interact with in-house staff.
But with this new level of functionality comes
a new level of complexity. To be effective,
Web services must always be up and running
at optimal levels. Downtime, or other problems
with Web services, can interrupt important
activities and can cost companies revenue.
According to ZapThink, a primary inhibitor to
the widespread adoption of Web services is a
lack of management capabilities.
To address the challenge of managing Web
services, CA offers the industry’s most