CA Technologies Extends Management Suite

The company today announced that it is extending the CA Automation Suite to include new offerings for automating IT management processes and a tool for automating the configuration of physical and virtual servers.

According to Ryan Shopp, senior director of automation product marketing, the new offerings are specifically designed to create easier entry points into IT automation. With most IT organizations relying on manual processes and some custom scripts, Shopp says CA Technologies wanted to deliver a tool that captures a customer’s existing processes and then helps automate them. Once that “tribal knowledge” is captured, Shopp said IT organizations can deploy the rest of the CA Automation Suite as they get more comfortable with the technology.

Shopp added that the addition to the CA Automation Suite makes it much easier for IT organizations to map the interdependencies in their systems to gain insight into the state of their overall IT organization. Once they gain that insight, Shopp said they can leverage best practices as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Other additions to the CA Automation Suite include a new version of the suite designed specifically for hybrid cloud computing scenarios, an implementation designed specifically for high-end data centers, tools specifically optimized for the Cisco Unified Computing System and updates to the rest of the suite that extend support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines and virtualization technologies from Amazon.

Beyond concerns over how IT automation will affect staffing, Shopp acknowledges that customers also need to be convinced that IT automation offerings can scale to meet their requirements. To that end, Shopp says CA Technologies is taking a more modular approach to IT automation that makes it easier for each IT organization to mature at its own pace.