CA Taps Former Cisco Development Exec To Be New Chief Product Officer

CA Technologies has named former Cisco development executive Ayman Sayed to be the software company's new chief product officer.

Sayed will be responsible for CA's product development efforts, including setting product direction and maintaining product excellence, according to the company. Sayed will report directly to CA Technologies CEO Mike Gregoire and will be based in the company's Santa Clara, Calif., office.

The appointment comes as CA is about to ship significant new releases of its DevOps software, including updates to CA Application Performance Management and CA Unified Infrastructure Management.

[Related: CA Shows Off Expanded IT Infrastructure Management Toolset]

Sayed had worked at Cisco since 1999, most recently as senior vice president of the vendor's Network Operating Systems Technology Group, where he managed 2,500 engineers and oversaw development of the network operating software that runs most of Cisco's networking products.

Prior to that he held leadership roles across several Cisco businesses including core routing, edge routing, enterprise access switching and mobile virtualization.

"Ayman is an accomplished technology executive with a big vision who has built world-class software development organizations and operated globally at scale," said Gregoire in a statement. "By focusing on product direction and excellence, Ayman will help CA build a differentiated product portfolio meant to help CA’s customers solve their most difficult business problems in the application economy."

At last year's CA World conference the company laid out a plan to focus on three product areas: IT and cloud management, DevOps and security.

Earlier this month CA announced CA APM 10, a new release of the application performance management systems, and CA UIM 8.3, a new release of the company's unified infrastructure management software. The two are key products in the company's DevOps portfolio, assisting with the rapid deployment of new applications, and monitoring and optimizing their performance. CA APM 10 is already available while CA UIM 8.3 is slated to be available by the end of this week.

CA APM 10 sports a redesigned user interface, new built-in analytics capabilities and new role-based technology. With the toolset DevOps teams can better determine if an application update impacts service quality.

CA UIM 8.3 now supports a number of big data platforms including Hadoop, Cassandra NoSQL and MongoDB environments. Also new is the integration with CA Network Flow Analysis and new analytic features – both designed to help infrastructure performance issues before they impact business users.

A&I Solutions, an Atlanta-based solution provider and CA Technologies partner, provides integrated enterprise solutions to its customers, including DevOps technology and services. "We work with a pretty wide range of their solutions," said A&I president John Balsavage, in an interview.

Balsavage said the new UIM release "finally gets us to that single pane of glass," referring to the software's ability to pull performance metrics from multiple systems and display them in a single monitor screen. "That by itself is very powerful," he said.

He said the new release of APM makes it easier to analysis the root cause of system problems. And he praised the new mobile interfaces for all the applications and the easier-to-use user interface. CA software UI's have, in the past, have had a reputation for being clunky, he said.

PUBLISHED JULY 27