LAS VEGAS — Computer Associates outlined its enterprise infrastructure management (EIM) strategy at CAWorld this week targeted at chief information officers.
The strategy, which intends to help CIOs manage IT assets, is based on
four solution sets: security, storage, life cycle management and service management.
“”CIOs have these constants: shedding waste and managing demand such as server consolidation, storage consolidation, security operations and processing,”” said Mark Barrenechea, senior vice-president of product development for Computer Associates International Inc. (CA).
Barrenechea also said that CA, with this EIM strategy, wants to encourage CIOs to begin to run their IT departments like a business. CA is so serious about this that the company wrote a number of business disciplines into the EIM strategy.
“”For every dollar IT spends about 60 cents of it is wasted and with that the IT infrastructure remains vulnerable,”” Barrenechea said.
For example, the top software vendors issued 75,000 patches or one major patch every six minutes. “”This means the underpinnings of the infrastructure is at risk,”” Barrenechea added.
Some of the other CIO challenges, Barrenechea stated are: IT complexity, labour, under utilized capital, vulnerable infrastructure, hard to set service levels, and upgraded demand.
The first product under the EIM umbrella is the CA Management Bundle for Microsoft Exchange. The product is an integrated management solution for security and data protection of e-mail. The Exchange bundle leverages CA’s Etrust, BrightStor, Unicenter and AllFusion products.
CA will also release Unicenter service management solutions through a partnership with Burlington, Ont.-based Pink Elephant and PinkRoccade of the Netherlands. PinkRoccade has a 20 per cent interest in Pink Elephant.
Pink Elephant and PinkRoccade will offer their assessment services to help CA customers adopt Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) through education, consulting and technology services ranging from assessment and project planning to implementation.
ITIL is a set of best practices taken from public and private sectors internationally and supported by CA’s qualification program, accredited training organizations and assessment tools.
For the first time, CIO budgets were geared toward management solutions rather than actual applications. Barrenechea cited an internal analyst report that found the management software market is expected to reach US$43 billion by 2007, growing at a rate of 10 per cent per year and faster than the applications sector.
Management software is comprised of infrastructure, storage, security, applications/data life cycle management, application development and data management.
“”Last year CIOs voted with their budgets and made management software 40 per cent large than applications,”” he said.
“”This market has some real staying power because every software vendor is introducing a new platform such as Microsoft with Longhorn, Oracle with 10G, IBM with Websphere and SAP with NetWeaver. This change needs to be understood and managed. It will be more relevant to CIOs two to three years from now,”” he said.
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