CA Eyes Integrators With Business-Process 'Playbook'

The Islandia, N.Y.-based vendor on Tuesday launched CleverPath Aion 10 software, designed to give integrators with consulting expertise a foundation for assembling business rule sets that apply to network operations and the behavior of personnel. The rule sets--similar to a National Football League playbook--can dictate everything from the right Web service to enlist during a particular process to the proper way an employee should respond to a phone inquiry, said Don LeClair, senior vice president of research and development at CA.

The initial CleverPath rule sets will need to be almost entirely customized for the company's respective business environments, LeClair said. As a result, CA first plans to sell the solutions only through its own direct-sales force and a limited number of integrators, he said. Those integrator partners will have business-process consulting experience in specific verticals or experience in working with such consultants.

Down the road, CA expects to gain enough experience deploying CleverPath to be able to offer it with industry-specific templates, reducing the amount of customization needed, LeClair added.

"The kind of partners we are going with for CleverPath with have experience in vertical markets like insurance, banking, manufacturing and similar fields," he said. "They may not be VARs, but in every case, a successful partnering relationship would be built around someone that has service implementation expertise."

CA is offering two flavors of CleverPath: one that can have its rule set configured by a business-process analyst, and one that can be configured by a programmer with code-writing skills, LeClair said.

For business-process analysts, CleverPath Aion Business Process Manager provides a foundation for business-process management, business-rules management and business-activity monitoring. And for programmers, CleverPath Aion Business Rules Expert offers similar business-process management through an object-oriented scripting process.

Both versions of CleverPath start at about $64,000, plus the cost of all necessary consulting and development fees to deploy the systems, LeClair said.