CA Chorus

On the face of it, CA Chorus helps simplify, automate and streamline the management of a mainframe environment, increases staff productivity, and (with knowledge mining and knowledge transfer techniques) helps address the issues of skill silo-isation and shortage – it claims to be the leading 21st century solution for reducing the cost and complexity of managing mission-critical mainframe operations.

However, the vision is a lot more than this. What CA Chorus does for the mainframe, it could do for all technology, enterprise wide. CA Chorus could be the lens through which you see the entire operational infrastructure, from a business service delivery POV, across hybrid cloud environments, and across mainframe and distributed platforms. In essence, with CA Chorus, someone in a support role doesn’t need to know what platform s/he is on or even which tool s/he is in, s/he simply gets the information s/he needs to fix the problem or escalate it to another role. We should note, however, that it is currently still mainframe-focused; although some of the  tools it integrates may have distributed-systems capabilities as well.

CA Chorus is a role-based solution and CA Technologies sees building it as an incremental journey, role by role. The first role supported was DB2 database management; followed by security and compliance management, and storage management; and support for other roles (e.g. workload management) is on the roadmap. However, we feel sure the vision is much wider than this and that supported roles will extend beyond mainframe management (to some extent, they already do) – the end-point depends, in part, on the vision and maturity of its customers and their ability to address their own internal silos.

CA sells its mainframe products, including CA Chorus, largely through its global direct channel, although it has opened its partner programs up to mainframe products since mid-2012.

CA Chorus is marketed for large enterprise mainframe customers at present. Fully effective exploitation of CA Chorus needs a reasonably mature enterprise culture, we think. Current customers include EL AL, the Israeli Airline Company.

CA Chorus is an integrated, role-based, collaborative, GUI workspace with knowledge-capture and knowledge-transfer features. As a workspace, it can integrate other tools either via specific integrations built by CA Technologies or via user-driven ad hoc integrations using published APIs. It also enables the automation of management processes. At present, it manages and automates mainframe management but it is built on open (open source) integration technologies and isn’t inherently limited to mainframe (or even CA Technologies) applications.

Before developing CA Chorus, CA Technologies hired an established external product design firm that had already helped design Apple products, amongst others. This firm provided basic operations research on how real mainframe managers and support staff went about their operational tasks – and CA Chorus was designed to simplify and automate these real-world operations. It is very fundamentally role-based, rather than technology or product based – it helps people in a specific set of roles carry them out, cutting across technology and product silos; it is also being developed and marketed role-by-role.

CA Technologies offers strong support for the mainframe community (see here) including the training of new mainframe support talent in its Mainframe Centre of Excellence in Prague. CA Chorus even has its own Facebook page. CA Technologies supports a rich set of user communities via MyCA; GA of CA chorus was discussed, for example, in the mainframe-software-manager global user-community.

CA Technologies offers expected enterprise levels of services and support for CA Chorus, with global 24x7x365 support if necessary, as well as classroom and web-based training. Remember, too, that CA Chorus’ knowledge capture and transfer capabilities can make CA Chorus itself into an enabler for in-house training.