CA Technologies: Contriving ALM Solutions for Effectively Tackling Application Economy
Mike Gregoire, CEO 500 million tweets a day are shaping consumer opinion. Are you equipped to manage this new reality? Do you have the applications at the front-end to perform flawlessly, capturing and holding the loyalty of your customers, seamlessly connecting with the enterprise?” These were the thought-provoking questions asked by Mike Gregoire, CEO, CA Technologies [NASDAQ: CA], in his keynote address for CA World 2014. The questions reflect the era of application economy where organizations are under an ever-increasing pressure to deliver new applications and services at an increasingly rapid pace. Increased demand for faster software release cycles require developers, testers, and performance teams to work in parallel.However, the manual processes of deploying code and data throughout application development lifecycle, each with specific requirements, are error prone, expensive, and time consuming. The sluggish adoption of cloud within businesses also proves to be a hindrance where management of heterogeneous infrastructure of physical, virtual and cloud environment is a tedious and laborious task. For many of the world leading organizations, this has become a thing of the past. Thanks to the efficacious Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions offered by CA Technologies.
The clients of CA Technologies are able to deftly tackle the challenge to leverage technology to grow their business and keep up with the new marketplace trends. The company is also a frontrunner in contributing to the growth of agile ALM landscape which is forecasted by IDC to reach $1.1 billion by 2017, showing a compounded annual growth rate of 39 percent from 2012 where it was $211.9 million.
Virtualize and Test New Applications on the Fly!
A host of solutions are offered by CA Technologies to address the pressing issues of organizations in ALM. “The days of doing a one-year implementation, running it for three years, and then hiring an outside consulting firm, and spending millions of dollars to do the upgrade are long gone,” Gregoire claims. Helping its clients align with the new business model is CA’s Service Virtualization. It enables applications developers to produce in parallel and find defects earlier in development. Service Virtualization provides the ability to simulate constrained or unavailable systems that conventional virtualization fails to address.
CA Services experts collaborate with their clients to identify and document the requirements and establish a metrics baseline that enables them to measure improvements in the service delivery, compliance, and from newly streamlines processes. It helps organizations to reduce concurrent demand for performance and functional testing environments and hardware. CA Services Virtualization Foundation services implement and configure a solution designed to reveal critical use cases for optimizing development environments.
Acceleration services extend the value of CA Service Virtualization by adding components that deliver additional benefits based on CA clients’ unique requirements.
Once such component is Test Automation Acceleration Services that offer a complete and collaborative automated testing solution designed for composite applications and other distributed application architectures that leverage SOA, BPM, integration suites, cloud and ESBs. Another component, Data Mining Acceleration Services, provide visibility inside the application architecture, learning from production to automatically generate performance profiles, test scenarios, data and virtual service assets. This component in helpful in bridging the gap between IT operations and application development with actionable and current data that a company’s team can use immediately.
By employing CA Service Virtualization, AutoTrader, an Atlanta, GA, based company that simplifies the process of buying and selling cars online, was able to save $300,000 in testing costs. The company, as an advertiser to allow private and trade buyers and sellers exchange vehicles, was facing challenges in releasing software updates on a weekly basis. Testing of the releases was becoming time-consuming, complex, and costly. CA Service Virtualization enabled AutoTrader to virtualize and test new services and apps on a multitude of devices. Now, AutoTrader is delivering new features in a shorter timeframe and for a lower cost, thus improving customer experience by many-fold, gaining competitive advantage. CA Service Virtualization reduced the software defects by 25 percent and cut testing times by 99 percent.
Concocting Services for Sure-Shot Success
CA Technologies has been offering solutions to optimize and streamline operations for a myriad of industry verticals, effectively tackling the surge in demands for new and cost-effective applications and services. Realizing the importance of release of new versions with a high level of integration with other toolsets, CA offers Release Automation. It facilitates deployment of new versions, releases, and features more efficiently by automating execution of tasks that can otherwise be manual, error prone, and tedious. CA Release Automation Services deliver a tailored deployment that can provide a comprehensive continuous delivery infrastructure to meet clients’ business needs.
Acceleration service for Release Automation is CA Release Automation Value Release. It first engages the customer in a high level analysis of the critical application release work streams across multiple domains, departments, and architectures to set out the framework and boundaries for each of the implementation work streams. The value release engagement also includes automation of release operations of one application, validation through the promotion paths, as well as mentoring and knowledge transfer intended to serve as the foundation that can be further built towards the goal of continuous delivery.
By employing CA Service Virtualization, AutoTrader, an Atlanta, GA, based company that simplifies the process of buying and selling cars online, was able to save $300,000 in testing costs. The company, as an advertiser to allow private and trade buyers and sellers exchange vehicles, was facing challenges in releasing software updates on a weekly basis. Testing of the releases was becoming time-consuming, complex, and costly. CA Service Virtualization enabled AutoTrader to virtualize and test new services and apps on a multitude of devices. Now, AutoTrader is delivering new features in a shorter timeframe and for a lower cost, thus improving customer experience by many-fold, gaining competitive advantage. CA Service Virtualization reduced the software defects by 25 percent and cut testing times by 99 percent.
CA Release Automation Services deliver a tailored deployment that can provide a comprehensive continuous delivery infrastructure to meet clients’ business needs
Concocting Services for Sure-Shot Success
CA Technologies has been offering solutions to optimize and streamline operations for a myriad of industry verticals, effectively tackling the surge in demands for new and cost-effective applications and services. Realizing the importance of release of new versions with a high level of integration with other toolsets, CA offers Release Automation. It facilitates deployment of new versions, releases, and features more efficiently by automating execution of tasks that can otherwise be manual, error prone, and tedious. CA Release Automation Services deliver a tailored deployment that can provide a comprehensive continuous delivery infrastructure to meet clients’ business needs.
Acceleration service for Release Automation is CA Release Automation Value Release. It first engages the customer in a high level analysis of the critical application release work streams across multiple domains, departments, and architectures to set out the framework and boundaries for each of the implementation work streams. The value release engagement also includes automation of release operations of one application, validation through the promotion paths, as well as mentoring and knowledge transfer intended to serve as the foundation that can be further built towards the goal of continuous delivery.
In an implementation highlight, City Index—one of the global leaders in Contracts for difference, foreign exchange, and spread betting—was hoping to automate the manual process of development and deployment. Since City Index operates as e-business in the ultra-competitive and highly regulated financial sector, the dynamic nature of its trading systems dictates twice-weekly software deployments. Value chain analysis showed that moving code through development environments to quality assurance, then pre-production before finally going live, made up 50 percent of the delivery effort. The organization selected CA Release Automation to streamline releases, speed up deployment, and allow more to be delivered for the same cost. Toby Young, CTO at City Index, said, “There are three things that can go wrong when deploying software— defects, environment issues or an incorrect deployment. Establishing which it is can have a significant delay on the quality assurance process. With CA Release Automation, we reduced our efforts in deploying changes through our environments by 50 percent, delivering software 25 percent faster.”
"Service Virtialization provides the ability to simulate constrained or unavailable systems that conventional virtualization fails to address"
CA Technologies has been helping numerous clients gain flexibility and accelerate performance within their enterprises. The application management solutions have also enabled enterprises to manage, maintain, and enhance their existing CA solutions for greater business values and resource effectiveness. “Our solution delivery methodology balances the benefits of proven best practices with the need for speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Our goal is to ensure projects are properly scoped and well-executed to drive solution adoption throughout the engagement,” explicates Gregoire.
With strategic acquisitions and partnerships, CA Technologies is making long strides toward improving its host of solutions in the ALM landscape. CA also closed an IP asset acquisition transaction of inUnision’s flagship enterprise ALM software solution, unifyALM, and has rebranded the solution as CA Application Lifecycle Conductor. This will be the first in a series of products CA Technologies delivers to help customers support DevOps initiatives with automated modernization, management, and maintenance of applications. “The velocity required for businesses to compete is tied to the delivery of complex, cross-platform applications with workflows that harmonize continuity, quality and traceability. CA Application Lifecycle Conductor integrates elements, such as requirements, source control management, testing and deployment into a unified view to complement any DevOps initiatives,” says Michael Madden, General Manager, Mainframe business, CA Technologies.
CA Technologies is now able to design, develop, and deliver best-of-breed enterprise ALM solutions to its clients and showcase the expertise it houses in the constantly changing market. By accelerating productivity and business velocity with built-in collaboration capabilities, including automated comprehensive auditing, CA will continue to empower its clients for effectively tackling the application economy.
"Service Virtialization provides the ability to simulate constrained or unavailable systems that conventional virtualization fails to address"
CA Technologies has been helping numerous clients gain flexibility and accelerate performance within their enterprises. The application management solutions have also enabled enterprises to manage, maintain, and enhance their existing CA solutions for greater business values and resource effectiveness. “Our solution delivery methodology balances the benefits of proven best practices with the need for speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Our goal is to ensure projects are properly scoped and well-executed to drive solution adoption throughout the engagement,” explicates Gregoire.
With strategic acquisitions and partnerships, CA Technologies is making long strides toward improving its host of solutions in the ALM landscape. CA also closed an IP asset acquisition transaction of inUnision’s flagship enterprise ALM software solution, unifyALM, and has rebranded the solution as CA Application Lifecycle Conductor. This will be the first in a series of products CA Technologies delivers to help customers support DevOps initiatives with automated modernization, management, and maintenance of applications. “The velocity required for businesses to compete is tied to the delivery of complex, cross-platform applications with workflows that harmonize continuity, quality and traceability. CA Application Lifecycle Conductor integrates elements, such as requirements, source control management, testing and deployment into a unified view to complement any DevOps initiatives,” says Michael Madden, General Manager, Mainframe business, CA Technologies.
CA Technologies is now able to design, develop, and deliver best-of-breed enterprise ALM solutions to its clients and showcase the expertise it houses in the constantly changing market. By accelerating productivity and business velocity with built-in collaboration capabilities, including automated comprehensive auditing, CA will continue to empower its clients for effectively tackling the application economy.
Company
CA Technologies
Headquarters
New York, NY
Management
Mike Gregoire, CEO
Description
Helps customers succeed in a futurewhere every business — from apparel to energy — is being rewritten by software.
