CA Integrates Service Quality Management Tools

CA announced Monday at CA World that it has integrated three of its main products to create a suite of service quality management tools that includes its new application performance management solution from the company's Wily Technology division. The application performance management product combines two CA Wily tools, Introscope and Customer Experience Manager, to manage the performance and availability of applications, portals and service-oriented architectures, said Mike Malloy, vice president of marketing and product development for CA's Wily Technology division.

The new application manager also will be integrated with CA's Unicenter Service Metric Analysis product, which aggregates and captures metrics across networks, and the Unicenter Service Desk, the company's incident and change management system.

The full integration of the products will be available later this year, the company said in a statement.

CA customers that deploy the three products will be able to generate service level reports "not based on guesswork, not based on anecdotes, but based on data," Malloy said.

"It's a closed loop system to manage business applications, create SLAs using hard data and communicate service trends to stakeholders with SLA reports."

Wily, acquired by CA in March 2006, has a "small, but growing" channel program, Malloy said.

"Wily focused on a direct selling model initially. Frankly, in the past even large integrators and VARs didn't have the ability or practices in place to deploy our technology," he said.

"That's changing as the needed skills are being developed in the VAR community. There are great opportunities for VARs and integrators with our products. We're looking for partners with an understanding of complex Web applications, a knowledge of service-level application management and IT management-level skills."

The service quality management suite already has remote monitoring capability, and CA is exploring hosted offerings in a software-as-a-service model, Malloy said.

Future editions of the product line may calculate financial penalties for missing metrics assigned by service contracts, he said.

"Wily is one of our hottest products, in one of the most in-demand product areas," said Bill Lipsin, senior vice president of worldwide channels at CA.