Analysis: Can CA compete with the big boys on business agility?

CA presented its strategy for business agility at CA World in Las Vegas last week – a move that will see the infrastructure management vendor compete with technology giants IBM and HP.

The event kicked off with CA's CEO Bill McCracken's suggestion that there are three things that constantly change the world: the economy, business needs and technology. He claimed combination of significant change in all three has made business agility much more important than it used to be.

The economic downturn has meant CIOs are under more pressure than ever to cut costs while having to adapt to rapid changes in the market. McCracken said that IT has traditionally been unable to change quickly enough to keep up with business demands. However, CA wants to make this a possibility.

David Dobson, group executive of CA, said in his keynote that businesses have moved from IT-centric services to business-centric services. He stated that the mainframe, distributed and virtual services are IT-centric and remain relevant. But now that things have moved to the cloud – with software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service – a new management model is needed to deal with these.

CA emphasised that it is not just about change. The speed of change is equally important to remain competitive, and IT should be brought closer to the business to achieve this.

The company unveiled a new product: Executive Insight for Service Assurance software, which aims to bring IT closer to the business. It is designed to provide data and key performance indicators on how IT services affect the wider business, enabling it to understand what technology is most important.

However, there is concern that the product will not be enough to differentiate CA from its competitors. "Although this product will help CA to accomplish its strategy, business agility is something many of CA's competitors are also dealing with," said Ovum analyst Roy Illsley.

Another product unveiled at CA was the Cloud 360 solution. Andi Mann, VP of CA's enterprise and cloud solutions, said it will "simplify cloud decisions for CIOs". The solution, an extension of the Cloud Commons resource centre, is customisable according to business goals and aims to guide CIOs though cloud migration by helping to answer key questions about the cloud.

But not everyone was impressed by CA's announcements. Illsley claimed that CA products often seem over-complicated because of constant rebranding.

"CA often makes its products and services seem complex, but this is a common problem with infrastructure management vendors," he said.

Although Illsley said it is difficult for CA to compete with IBM and HP as it can spend less on products enabling business agility, he explained that the two giants are less flexible than CA because their focus is hardware.

"CA's biggest downfall is that it is a $4bn company and the other two are $100bn companies. However, it does allow customers the freedom to buy the infrastructure they want and manage it with toolsets they already have," he said.

He went on to explain that IBM and HP mainly sell their business agility solutions to customers using their underlying technology.

Illsley added that the most interesting part of CA's current strategy was the use of Nimsoft which it acquired in March 2010.

"CA is being very clever with Nimsoft. The company has allowed it to become a standalone company and to go after the midmarket.

"CA competes with the top 4000 companies or so but it hardly has a presence in the mid-market, nor do its bigger rivals, and this is something that Nimsoft does have," said Illsley.