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Every US city trumpets that it has the biggest of something. New
Orleans claims two: –one, it is the biggest port in the world, on the banks of the
Mississippi and two, it hosts the biggest IT trade show in the world every year for
Computer Associates. And that is to say nothing of the jazz and Mardi Gras. The Computer
Associates summer show, CA World, is truly enormous. Nearly 30,000 people - employees,
partners, users, press and analysts - descend on a vast conference centre and the nearby
French Quarter. That is impressive in itself. But after a week’s hype and
hospitality, what has CA the company been up to in the last 12 months, and where does it
see itself going?
Razzmatazz
These events are designed to show a company bursting with energy, ideas and action.
Charles Wang, the ever witty and likeable chairman and CEO, proved the point by making his
keynote stage appearance on a motorbike, having performed stunts en route to the hall.
This included smashing through a wall covered by the IBM logo, which was televised for all
the delegates to enjoy. Journalists were a little suspicious. Was this a bit like the
speechmaker who on coming to a weak point prompts himself with ‘shout louder’?
Or was it rather just the American characteristic of taking pure delight in dream-team
corporations?
Not that CA has been twiddling its collective thumbs. Wang spoke of its embrace of
electronic commerce (more of which follows). A number of initiatives have progressed with
IT vendor partners. But perhaps the biggest news item of the year was the acquisition of
business intelligence company Platinum technology, and with this we begin.
"Less than two months after completing the largest software acquisition in history,
we are pleased to detail our plans to extend, enhance and integrate Platinum product lines
with CA solutions," announced Yogesh Gupta, CA senior vice president of product
strategy. CA’s strategy is to seamlessly meld CA and Platinum resources to help
organisations radically improve all aspects of application development, data management,
security, and e-commerce. Platinum brings a proven arsenal of business intelligence (BI)
tools to the party.
Joined-up righting
CA manoeuvres itself into the position of being able to introduce new intelligent
monitoring and management capabilities, aimed at decreasing the burden of managing BI
environments. Analysts Aberdeen Group believe this is a compelling combination. BI is
hampered by the problems of integrating disparate data sources for applications. However,
with Platinum, CA is able to cover the full database management spectrum. The roadmap the
company detailed covers application development, data warehousing and business
intelligence, enterprise performance and database management, DB2 solutions, job
management, and security.
Apart from issues such as manageability and object technology, which those familiar with
CA would expect, the BI proposition will include two additional interesting features. One
is visualisation and the other concerns intelligent agents, or e-thinking as Wang called
it.
Visualisation, for Wang, is the ability to break down the barrier between human beings and
computer content. "But not just eye candy: real usability and sophistication,"
he added. The point is that visualisation of information, processes and systems aids
comprehension and retention, important elements for understanding and managing business.
Users of CA’s Unicenter will have seen early attempts at providing this 3-D business
environment, undoubtedly a substantial advance on tree diagrams and icons for certain
kinds of management problem. But this is only just the start of it, enabled in particular
with what will effectively be infinite computer power in a few short years time.
E-thinking also rests on what computers will be able to do tomorrow, though it begins
today. In CA’s world, that means Neugents, artificial intelligence agents that
predict the future on the basis of discerned patterns in the past. The applications vary
from warning when a server is likely to crash, to forecasting sales to high levels of
detail. Neugents can be applied to databases already, but it is very much a matter of
‘watch this space’ as CA rolls out developments post-Platinum.
e-nfrastructure
Related announcements at CA World dealt with the infrastructure required for electronic
business, inevitably coined ‘e-nfrastructure’. The point is that the company
believes it has the full range of integrated products required to work within these new
commercial disciplines. Jasmine TND, the component-based development and deployment
environment, enables users to draw from back-end data sources to create applications that
can be deployed across the Internet for thin and fat clients, that is in a distributed
environment.
"IDC believes that the combination of Jasmine TND’s component architecture and
its depth of deployment services, combined with its Web centricity and its Neugent
technology, render Jasmine TND an early leader in the development of next-generation tools
for ‘CyberSmart’ applications," said Anthony Picardi, an analyst with IDC.
"The versatility of the component framework means that it will fill a wide range of
functional needs hitherto addressed only by unintegrated point solutions."
As important, and potentially far more costly, is the maintenance of the complex networks
upon which e-business depends. According to GartnerGroup, $1.5bn was spent on network
management software in 1998 but this rose to $25.5bn once the implementation, consultancy
and maintenance costs were included. That expense is only likely to increase given that
the Internet generally has far less tolerance of availability and performance problems.
Unicenter TND provides service level monitoring and management with the ability to respond
instantly to adverse conditions that arise. Newly developed Neugents for various platforms
reduce downtime and operational costs of these applications. Unicenter is also available
for Web site management and, more interestingly, will include support for implementing
storage area networks. This technology, which CA is calling the Storage Area Network
Integrated Technology Initiative (Saniti), enables network administrators to manage SAN
products such as routers, switches, fibre channel hubs and tape libraries. In a SAN,
storage devices are connected to a separate network, not managed by a particular server,
and can therefore be shared among multiple host servers without affecting system
performance or users' main IT network.
Trust me – I’m a security solution
eTrust is CA’s newly announced security solution, aimed in particular at providing
security without compromising transaction integrity. This portfolio of tools includes
trusts certificates, encryption controls, antivirus mechanisms, malicious code prevention,
intrusion detection, PKI certification and single sign-on authentication authorisation and
repudiation. (Another piece of jargon to watch our for – Online Certificate Status
Protocol, OCSP – allowing companies to conduct business to business e-commerce over
the banking industry’s Identrus network.) Linux is firmly part of CA’s world. In
fact, one of the scoops of the year was the leak that CA will hand out the Linux version
of its Unicenter TNG systems management software suite for free, under a 90-day
introductory programme following which new clients who sign up for one year of maintenance
and support will receive a one-year licence. This is the first time CA has ever given away
the product and could save users about $2,000 (£1,250) on the usual Unicenter cost per
server.
The release of a Linux version of Unicenter will allow IT departments to use the free
operating system as a platform from which to manage their other operating systems. And it
combines well with other Linux announcements, including a Linux version of its MasterIT
e-commerce/Web management solution and shipping Ingress II with support for Linux
platforms from the fourth quarter of this year. This release follows CA’s successful
Open Beta program, through which thousands of copies of Ingres II Linux Edition provided
the Linux community with the benefits of a high-performance, state-of-the-art relational
database management system (RDBMS).
Partners featured strongly at CA World too, and a number of announcements were related to
new alliances and plans. With 3Com, an alliance was announced that included the beta
availability of Unicenter TNG Switch Management Option 2.0 for 3Com network products,
including CoreBuilder and SuperStack II. Also available is Unicenter TNG Software Delivery
Option and ShipIT Enterprise Edition for the Palm Computing platform. The aim here is to
tackle the costs of building and deploying applications for mobile workforces. With these
products users can synchronise Palm Computing devices with a Unicenter TNG server,
eliminating the need for full manual installations while helping administrators to resolve
problems and perform updates.
A new division of CA also made its debut, interBiz Solutions, an open solution for
application integration across enterprises, that engages with the Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) space. "The BizWorks framework provides ways to use the myriad of
available information sources to gain strategic advantage," explained Reuven Battat,
president of the division.
It’s peanuts
A different, but interesting, concluding touch to CA World was a speech by former
president Jimmy Carter. Within two minutes of taking the podium he told the assembled,
largely pro-American, audience that the US was ‘superstingy’ as well as a
superpower and does not care for the world’s poor. The point is that the Carter
Foundation has done tremendous work in the underdeveloped world and that CA is to lend
support to it too. It is good to see extremely rich corporations trying to develop another
side to their lives beyond profit making and servicing customers.  |
