Many enterprises are at a point in time to where they need to make decisions about where to start with cloud computing. Some have already started projects in cloud computing but are unsure where the next best steps are. In my conversations with customers I've heard a few common themes emerge from both camps around private clouds:

1. The top down business challenges have to be addressed, including rapid delivery of services while reducing the associated costs. "My business users are experimenting with new service offerings for our customers that may have a short life; we need to be able to rapidly enable those offerings and not charge them a ton of money."
2. Leverage existing technology (hardware from multiple vendors, virtualization software, etc.) investments and continue with economies of consolidation. "I've spent a ton on hardware already and made a big investment in virtualization; how do I effectively provide services with these resources?"
3. The need for a well defined set of use cases (best practices) out-of-the-box, combined with high degrees of integration between the components. "I've heard from the virtualization vendors, from hardware vendors and consultants, they don't have an out-of-the-box starting point that really manages physical and virtual well enough or it requires their hardware."
4. The need to shrink consulting fees in order to get started with a private cloud. "Services engagements for private clouds are often open ended and it's not clear what the starting point is in terms of functionality and the costs are too high."
5. The need to have flexibility and agility as requirements change.  "We need to be able to extend and modify our private cloud use cases/workflows easily and quickly to take advantage of hybrid and public cloud opportunities while still being able to manage our own private cloud."

CA Automation Suite for Clouds is a brand new solution that provides technology, best practices processes and services that enable customers to transform their existing IT infrastructures to deliver cloud services.  By combining leading technology with out-of-the-box processes and a small prescriptive consulting engagement, customers can now have a very specific starting point for a private cloud.  CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides heterogeneous support across hypervisors, servers, storage, network and public cloud resources. 

CA Automation Suite for Clouds provides customers with a solid foundation to rapidly deliver new revenue generating services while leveraging best practices and further extracting costs from their infrastructure.  Additional use cases and the move to hybrid and public cloud interoperability are accomplished by leveraging the existing implementation without having to start over.  CA Automation Suite for Clouds is extensible in a straight forward manner by customers & partners so the private cloud can be run and optimized to deliver superior service.