News from CA World 2013 – Fytte the First

So, CA Technologies has a new CEO at last (see management team bios here) and Michael P. Gregoire looks as though  he may be what the company needs. Talking to people at CA Technologies, he seems to have gone through its somewhat diverse and overlapping product portfolio (a lot of it acquired, although these days CA Technologies does develop its acquisitions and place its own stamp on them), put in place (or, perhaps, refined) its strategic vision and promised to grow the company organically in future. So, see other blogs for the details of the (recent past) acquisitions announced this time :-). And, there is also a real example of organic innovation – CA Clarity Playbook, which is about collaboration (between business and IT) over planning.

The 4 trends Gregoire noted, and that CA Technologies is responding to,  are:

• DevOps – and CA Technologies has a strong story here with a full feedback loop including production monitoring (so it does QA as well as speed), based on CA LISA (see Philip Howard’s market update on Service Virtualisation here) and Nolio. Yes, both acquisitions, the last announced at CA World yesterday, but they’re pretty good choices; CA LISA now supports more protocols (including mainframes) and advanced data mining (of Production) with a new Pathfinder capability; and is linked to Nolio for continuous application delivery, as well as to existing CA Technologies performance management tools and its Cloud management tools.
• Cloud, with special emphasis on hybrid environments, cloud management and cloud security (yes, another acquisition, Layer 7, for API managenment; and CA CloudMinder for Identity and Access Management). Another strong story here – CA Technologies has had a good cloud management/governance story since the days of Cloud Commons.
• Mobile, with an interesting and synergistic partnership with SAP. CA Technologies is particularly strong in management; SAP is particularly strong in business applications and, courtesy of SAP’s Sybase acquisition, has a good mobile device management story with Afaria.
• Big Data analytics. Of course, it’s the future, everyone agrees (although not everyone seems to agree on what it actually is or what you can do with it practically, yet).

The story for the next year is around ensuring customer success, and Gregoire talks about investments in moving customers to newer versions of software and delivering “bankable” product roadmaps. In fact, I think I even heard him talk about a free professional services audit for all customers around doing more with the CA technology they already have. And Gregoire thinks that getting everyone onto the latest relaeases would be a good basis for exploiting their investment in CA going forward.