CA Community

Five Things I Learned About Innovation from Sir Richard Branson

Andi Mann — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

I still cannot believe I had the opportunity to interview Sir Richard Branson one-on-one for our Luminaries video series – in which we interview prominent business, technology and government leaders. If you have been following along, you know I was hugely excited just to be able to see Sir Richard Branson on stage at the CA World plenary keynote. I wrote about why Branson was a perfect fit...

CA Technologies Receives “Strong Positive” Rating in Gartner’s IT Project and Portfolio Management MarketScope Report

Mary Cauwels — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:32:00 GMT

It's with great pleasure that I announce that CA Technologies received a "Strong Positive" rating, the highest rating possible, in the 2013 Gartner MarketScope for IT Project and Portfolio Software Applications*. According to the report: "IT project and portfolio management (PPM) leaders are under extreme pressure to improve the speed, accuracy and agility of their project...

Perfecting the Mainframe: The Conversation Behind the Code

Alice Horrigan — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:02:00 GMT

Louis Pasteur used to say, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” A recent meeting of the minds at CA World is a case in point. In Las Vegas April 22-24, a group of CA Technologies software architects held an informal “hackathon” with customers. The objective wasn’t to write code, but rather to explore ideas. Not about anything in particular, just about the problems of business and...

Cloud Computing Satisfaction is Way Up. Or Is It?

Guest Contributor — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

By Mike Elgan Mike Elgan is a Silicon Valley-based writer who specializes in technology and innovation. His work appears most frequently in Computerworld, Datamation, Cult of Mac, Cult of Android, Houzz, PC World, InfoWorld, MacWorld, CIO Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. CA Technologies commissioned a surprising new study from Luth Research and Vanson Bourne of...

Is Your Service Management Vision Getting Blurry?

Allen Houpt — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:46:00 GMT

As I sat in the optometrist's office last week trying to "rationalize" why the eye chart was blurry - I'm NOT getting older, but yes I do need new reading glasses - I started thinking about how the line between Service Management and IT Infrastructure Management continues to blur. This started many years ago with discrete products such as service desks, CMDBs, support...

Cloud Success Tips from the Future

Jackie Kahle — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

Imagine if you could take a time machine five years into the future, so that you would know which of today’s new technologies panned out and which did not. Most companies have only started using cloud in the past two years. But there are some companies that have been using cloud for five years or more. They are “five years into the future” -- they’ve learned things that companies that just...

For Cloud Success, Stop Worrying About the Wrong Problems

Patrick Ancipink — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:15:00 GMT

There are some real issues that can tangle you up in the cloud. But they may not be the obvious ones . Your organization could be hit hard if you get caught up on cloud myths rather than relevant challenges and opportunities. Let's start with security and privacy. Though they garner a lot of headlines they are not the quite the obstacle they were built up to be, especially in Europe. Compare...

Cloud Works: Now Let the Innovation Begin

John Michelsen — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Technologists like proofs of concept. The testing – formal, informal or otherwise – that shows without much doubt something will work. And business leaders prefer when technology doesn’t negatively impact the bottom line; better yet, the business wants to see revenue increases thanks to an IT investment. I was lucky to get a preview of the cloud report we just made available today, and there’s a...

The Case for Vanilla Ice Cream

Crystal Miceli — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:12:00 GMT

The world is a complex place. Each day we are faced with more and more options for every service experience. Think about what it means to order coffee today as opposed to 50 years ago. Then you got a cup of black coffee and could add your own sugar and/or cream. Now you have half-fat, non-fat, Splenda or Equal, foam or no foam, chocolate sprinkles or hazelnut flavoring, and that's...

Customer Q&A with Tata Communications

Christine Needles — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:05:00 GMT

From time to time we have a great opportunity to hear from our customers and partners from around the world here on this blog by way of brief Q&As. This week, as several of my CA Technologies colleagues prepare for the Citrix Synergy event taking place in Anaheim, CA, we had a chance to connect with Srinivasan CR, VP of Global Product Management, Data Centre Services at Tata Communications,...

Securing Sensitive Big Data

Lonne Jaffe — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

The term “Big Data” actually dates at least as far back as 1997, when it was used in a NASA paper to describe data sets that were so large they would stretch the capacity limits of computer memory and disk storage. Since that time, there’s been an explosion in the quantity of data that’s being generated and analyzed. We already have more than 2.5 billion terabytes (more than 2.5 zettabytes) of...

This Week in Cloud, May 16, 2013: The rogue cloud crackdown, IT departments are the new CSPs, Cloud failure points

Derek Stevens — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:50:00 GMT

Cloud News A survey by PMG reveals that companies are starting to crackdown on employees' use of rogue cloud services, according to this Forbes article. Compliance and security concerns are leading the drive to tougher restrictions on services like DropBox, Skype, and social media sites. A new survey by InformationWeek reveals that 40% of companies are now using cloud services and 51% of...

5 Top Disruptive Trends and the Tie That Binds Them Together

Jackie Kahle — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

Over the last two months, CA Technologies Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy Lonne Jaffe sat down for a series of fascinating podcasts on four of the biggest technology trends today – Big Data, Mobility, SaaS and DevOps – and a capstone trend called the Changing Role of IT. For those who would rather read about these insights than listen to them, they have recently been published as...

Bring Your Own Identity: the Rise of the User

Henk van der Heijden — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:01:00 GMT

Social media is fast becoming the identity mechanism of choice to log into popular sites and company information. Looking to find the right music on Spotify? Want to connect with the world’s professionals on LinkedIn? You can now simply log in via your Facebook account. The UK Government may even soon allow citizens to use their social media identity to access public services safely and securely...

Supporting Industry Standards

Chris Wraight — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:07:00 GMT

On May 7, Andras Cser of Forrester Research, Inc. posted a thought-provoking blog entry entitled “XACML is Dead” which postulated that there wasn’t any future for XACML. At CA Technologies we have long supported a broad range of industry standards such as LDAP, X.509, WS-Federation, SAML, WS-Security, REST, SPML as well as more recent standards like OpenID, OpenID Connect and OAuth, thereby...

The Top 5 Sofware-as-a-Service Risks: And How to Mitigate Them

Lonne Jaffe — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

You may have heard that cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models can turn software technology into a pay-as-you-go utility that businesses can “plug in to” and use like electricity? Perhaps — however, software technology is far more varied, nuanced and diverse than electricity. You don’t win customers by having better electricity than your competition. Software, by contrast,...

Cloud Computing: Regulatory Complexity Requires Systems Thinking

George Watt — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:27:00 GMT

In a recent article Peter Wayner cautions that "No one knows which laws apply" in reference to the fact that a customer may be in one jurisdiction and the cloud instance they receive may be in another. He is correct in his assertion that this can cause regulatory complexity. In fact it could be far more complex than stated in his article. The customer may be in one jurisdiction, the...

Why CA Nimsoft Service Desk Is “Service Different”?

Gijo Mathew — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:37:00 GMT

At Peter Griffiths' CA World keynote, we ran a video of CA Nimsoft Service Desk as an example of CA Technologies "Cloud First" strategy. The video concludes with "It's time to change the way we service the business, Service Different." Throughout the event, people asked me what is so unique and game-changing about "Service Different?" I think the question...

Identity-centric Security

Sumner Blount — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:20:00 GMT

The “good old days” are gone forever. Those were the days when IT environments were more predictable and easier to control. The user population and their access patterns were more easily defined. Stick a firewall in front of key systems, create some controls around who can access what, and you’re done. The world is far different now. The headlong march towards the cloud has made the...

The Changing Face of Cyber-Attacks

Russell Miller — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:51:00 GMT

It is tempting to think about cyber-attacks as an ever-present, but unchanging threat. To the contrary, attacker profiles have shifted, and new goals and sources of motivation have fundamentally altered the nature of the threat landscape. The trends driving this shift include: The militarization of cyber-attacks. Network penetrations to cause damage and steal intellectual property are now...

This Week in Cloud, May 9, 2013: U.K. issues cloud-first policy, Dell acquires Enstratius, OpenStack's growing pains

Derek Stevens — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:15:00 GMT

Cloud News The U.K. government announced that it plans to formally adopt a cloud-first policy, according to this InformationWeek article. As part of the cloud-first policy, government agencies will be required to evaluate cloud solutions to meet their IT needs before considering other options. Dell announced that it is purchasing Enstratius, a cloud computing startup that provides tools and...

Can ITIL Survive?

Robert Stroud — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:09:00 GMT

The Cabinet Office recently entered into a joint venture (JV) with Capita to manage and develop the U.K. government's frameworks including ITIL® and Prince2®. More details on the frameworks are available on the Best Practice Management website. After a week of lobbing emails and phone calls around the industry, I have yet to find any groundswell of support for the move. In fact, most...

A Technologist’s Look at "Disconnect" the Movie

Jacob Lamm — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

This is not your typical movie review. I am not a movie critic. But someone has to stand up for social technology, which has been unjustly maligned in the movie Disconnect. As a technologist and social media user, I guess that job falls to me. Released in April 2013, Disconnect was directed by Henry-Alex Rubin and written by Andrew Stern. Its ensemble cast includes Jason Bateman, Hope Davis and...

Know Your Cloud Failure Points

Guest Contributor — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:08:00 GMT

By David Strom David Strom is an author, podcaster, and professional speaker who is an expert on networking, security, and Internet technologies. He blogs at strominator.com and can be found at david@strom.com or on Twitter @dstrom. He is the author of two computer books, and the former editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware.com and Network Computing magazines. Part of securing your...

Mobility Trends Demand CIOs Become Chief Experience Officers

George Watt — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:47:00 GMT

Recently, while thinking about several of the technology trends impacting mobility and mobile computing, my thoughts again turned to the one trend that I believe is driving all of the others. This trend has the potential to dramatically change the role of IT and IT leaders. In order to better understand the overarching trend, first consider some of the most important trends impacting...