CA Looks to Unify Enterprise Management

CA today is rolling out a Cross Enterprise Application Performance Management (Cross APM) platform that integrates the company’s SYSVIEW mainframe management software with its Wily application performance management platform, which the company acquired in 2006. Here's a quick look at the interface:

Cross APM is being positioned as the first effort to give IT organizations a unified platform for managing mainframes and distributed computing applications holistically. According to CA, as mainframes have become a strong element of the distributed computing environment, customers have been asking for a way to cut their management overhead costs. In particular, CA officials note that IT organizations today typically spend two-thirds of their budgets on keeping their existing systems running. In this tough economy, IT organizations are looking for ways to cut those costs by unifying their mainframe and distributed systems management teams, they said.

To make Cross APM possible, CA has upgraded both its SYSVIEW and the Wily management platforms. CA refers to the ongoing effort to lower the real cost of managing enterprise computing as Lean IT, which is a recurring theme the company has used to unite a broad range of new systems management issues. The company also has a long term Mainframe 2.0 initiative under way that seeks to simplify the management tasks typically associated with mainframes.

Whether that concept takes hold in the face of more than 30 years of systems management inertia that has always treated mainframe and distributed computing systems as distinct disciplines remains to be seen.