CA Technologies announced a new version of CA Infrastructure Management (CA IM), the cornerstone of the company’s converged infrastructure management solution that enables a superior and differentiated customer experience.

By integrating elements of CA Technologies Service Assurance portfolio, CA IM quickly translates volumes of disparate performance data into actionable insight delivered in unified, user-specific views that help enterprise and service provider customers cost effectively improve service quality, predictability and efficiency.

“CIOs have become Chief Experience Officers as the customer experience becomes an increasingly powerful weapon in today’s competitive world,” said Mike Sargent, general manager, Enterprise Management, CA Technologies. “Cloud, virtualization and mobile growth have changed the way users consume IT-related services, making the IT function more important to the customer experience. We developed CA Infrastructure Management to help our enterprise and service provider customers capture, engage and retain customers by offering a superior and differentiated customer experience. A new study* shows that when customers act on the insight delivered by CA IM, service problems can be resolved as much as 25 times faster. And we estimate that it can be done up to 50 percent less total cost.”

Increases in volume and types of traffic, data and devices on the Internet, coupled with outdated methods, processes and tools to manage them, creates a level of IT complexity that challenges IT organizations as they strive to meet soaring customer expectations.

CA Infrastructure Management addresses these challenges by offering specialized functionality, sophisticated analytics capabilities, massive scalability and adaptability for existing environments. The solution provides IT teams easy access to graphic displays of the specific information they need to improve service quality and deliver a superior customer experience with less effort and reduced costs.

In particular, CA IM helps:

• Enterprise IT personnel manage rapid growth of bring your own device (BYOD), video and application complexity in heavily virtualized infrastructures

• Communication Service Providers simplify and accelerate 4G network rollouts

• Managed Service Providers create new sources of revenue and onboard new clients faster

“Time means everything to enterprise IT and service provider operators, because the slightest delay in access to or performance of online services can quickly have a negative impact on customer/user experience,” said Jim Frey, managing research director, Enterprise Management Associates. “CA Technologies has completed a major effort to converge its infrastructure management solution with the goal of saving time in recognizing and mitigating experience-impacting incidents and problems. Such approaches can transform the way technology support organizations manage complex physical, virtual, cloud and mobile environments by accelerating operations efficiency and putting teams in position to proactively assure high quality service experience.”

When combined with other Service Assurance solutions, CA IM provides customers with comprehensive service visibility to help ensure the availability and performance of business services and the infrastructures they rely on.

This convergence of technologies helps provide a superior customer experience through:

• Converged Application and Infrastructure: End-to-end application response time monitoring that tracks, measures and analyzes application performance across the network infrastructure, compares the response time against intelligent baselines and thresholds, and alerts on any performance deterioration to deliver application-aware infrastructure management.

• Converged Functional Domains: An advanced architecture that offers agent-less collection and state-of-the-art aggregation for comprehensive collection and analysis of performance, fault and flow data that spans multiple functional areas across network, systems and application domains.

• Converged Networks: Integrated performance management for network-based voice and video, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Microsoft Lync, and AVAYA platforms. Customers can use the solution to track, evaluate and report on key performance metrics to help ensure quality of experience and network quality of service for unified communications.

• Converged Analytics: Dynamic, federated performance analytics that span the entire infrastructure to determine baselines, calculate trends, establish thresholds, detect anomalies and trigger automatic investigation. Results are delivered in converged, contextual views for actionable intelligence based on the user’s role.

CA Services and CA Education support CA Infrastructure Management with implementation offerings including foundation services to rapidly deploy the solution to meet business requirements and acceleration services to extend the value of the foundation implementation with additional capabilities such as multi-tenancy support. Strategic consulting, managed services and instructor-led Web-based training for customers and partners are also available.