Acquisitions and expanded portfolios unveiled at CA World

  • Acquisition of Layer 7 and Nolio announced, along with license agreement with SAP for Afaria MDM
  • New analytics capabilities to service assurance portfolio and enhancements made to CA Global Partner Program

Acquisitions and expanded portfolios unveiled at CA WorldA SLEW of new product and acquisition announcements opened the second day of CA World in Las Vegas.
 
Peter Griffiths (pic), executive vice president and group executive of the Enterprise Solutions and Technology Group at CA Technologies, took to the stage to highlight recent moves and developments made by the company.
 
Citing a Cisco statistic, Griffiths noted that by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to networks, averaging out to six devices per person.
 
“Behind it all is the enterprise systems that facilitate all these transactions. How do these systems talk to each other? Via application programming interfaces (APIs),” he said.
 
“APIs are no longer technical nice-to-haves, they’re changing and transforming business models.
 
“In today’s reality of anytime and anywhere computing driven by mobile devices and BYOD (bring your own device), the interaction of these systems is becoming more complex, raising the stakes of IT management and security,” he added.
 
In line with these trends, CA Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of API management and security.
 
“The addition of Layer 7 and the synergy across our technologies will improve how we securely support organizations in their cloud, mobile and ‘Internet of things’ initiatives,” said Mike Denning, security general manager, CA Technologies.
 
The acquisition of Layer 7 will enable CA Technologies to manage and secure the API marketplace with leading technology that complements its current Identity and Access Management suite, including CA SiteMinder, and its technologies focused on DevOps including the CA LISA suite.
 
“We use APIs every day, whether accessing flight data from our mobile device, using Google Maps from a hotel website, or making payments online,” said Denning.
 
“There are billions of API calls a day and that number is going to increase with the proliferation of smart devices, ranging from vehicles, meters, TVs and other devices, as they start interacting over APIs.
 
“Without API security and management, thousands of business services are vulnerable to disruption,” he added.
 
Layer 7 chief executive officer Paul Rochester that with more than 8,000 public APIs available at the end of 2012, there is a vast library of proprietary components and data exposed to the external world that need to be managed and secured from unauthorized access.
 
“API applications and services are no longer a trend, they are mainstream,” he added.
 
Layer 7’s API management and security capabilities are delivered both on-premise and from the cloud. The company, founded in 2002, has offices in the United States, Canada and Europe.
 
CA Technologies also announced it is rapidly expanding its market-leading CA LISA solutions to address the most critical challenges in operationalizing DevOps methodologies, helping customers improve application development and delivery to accelerate innovation.
 
As part of this initiative, the company announced it has acquired Nolio, to bring continuous delivery capabilities to its service virtualization business.
 
CA Technologies also announced a license agreement with SAP for its Afaria Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution, which lays the groundwork for the company’s mobility initiatives.
 
“Our customers are looking for us to provide essential technology solutions to take advantage of the mobile opportunity,” said Ram Varadarajan, general manager, New Business Innovation, CA Technologies.
 
“After thoughtful evaluation, we have licensed the proven and market-leading SAP Afaria mobile device management solution to provide this capability to our customers and serve as a key component for us to build other solutions.
 
“We differentiate ourselves from other MDM vendors with the breadth of our offerings. Our current and future solutions help IT leaders become the de facto change-agent for their business by accelerating, transforming and securing enterprise mobility for business innovation and growth,” he added.
 
The company claimed its CA Mobile Device Management provides the capabilities necessary to secure and manage mobile users, devices, applications and content (data).
 
Delivered as a scalable, software-as-a-service model or as an on-premise solution, CA MDM improves productivity by enabling a BYOD strategy and providing a simple, intuitive and self-service enterprise app store.
 
It also automates IT management with real-time insight into mobile device status and usage, along with automated device enrollment, configuration and decommissioning.
 
The company also announced new IT operational analytics capabilities in CA Application Performance Management (APM) that help customers ensure an exceptional end-user experience by more easily diagnosing potential performance problems in productivity and revenue-generating applications and services.

The company revealed that CA Executive Insight for Service Assurance will soon help IT leverage a variety of analytics sources to enhance service performance.
 
Designed for the mobile platform, the product connects executives and decision-makers to real-time views of how the health and performance of key IT services impact business outcomes.
 
A new Web services query tool will gather information from Big Data sources such as General Sentiment, a social analytics company that delivers insights that change the way brands make product and marketing decisions.
 
In addition, customers will be able to use CA Executive Insight to connect application developers with mobile and Web analytics systems, exposing valuable data with Internet accessible APIs.
 
With 33% of enterprise budgets spent on IT management and security, a recent study showed that CIOs will continue to outsource to third-party providers primarily to help solve standardization of the ‘hybrid cloud’ approach in the IT industry.
 
This includes both on- and off-premise with 80% of enterprise IT using third-party providers.
 
In line with this trend, CA Technologies announced key enhancements made to the CA Global Partner Program that provide partners with flexibility, speed and agility to support changing business models and meet new customer demands.
 
“Our partners are creating hybrid models for customers migrating to hybrid environments that require transitions across multiple platforms and providers,” said David Bradley, senior vice president, Global Partners.
 
“As a result, the enhancements to our CA Global Partner Program address this industry shift,” he claimed.
 
Gabey Goh reports from CA World 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada. See also Embrace disruptive technologies to drive business: CA Tech
 
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