As any parent of young children on Christmas Eve, or someone who has ever purchased furniture from Ikea, no words cause fear like the words “some assembly required.” As someone who has spent hours in the basement with voluminously detailed instructions and a pile of parts, I can say this was not often a delightful experience. Now, you really can’t find any consumer product where there is any significant delay between buying it and starting to enjoy what you have bought.
CA Technologies, and most every other vendor in our industry, historically provided a set of products, and relied on skilled customers or services to make them successful. We tended to create powerful tools, but did not provide the “content” to get customers going quickly. Customers had to figure out how to wire the products together, and then figure out how to create and run the processes that spanned the different products. This resulted in major investments to get a set of products to act like a solution and considerable delay before seeing benefits from these solutions.
Today, we are significantly changing the way that CA Technologies delivers solutions to our customers. This summer we launched two new solutions: Automation Suite for Clouds, and CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock. These solutions leverage a console and cartridge model, much like a gaming system, except that the objective is to deliver a ready-to-use solution to allow customers enable their end users to do self-service automation of their business services to rapidly deliver infrastructure needs for their development and test environments or deliver virtual desktops. In this analogy, the game console is a tested, documented combination of the products CA Service Catalog, and CA Process Automation as a console to deliver automated IT services with reporting and billing and metering capabilities. The console is flexible to add the needed cartridges by integrating content in the form of Service Catalog definitions, automated processes, and Catalyst connectors used to fulfill end-user requests. To ensure rapid delivery of the solution above, a Solution Guide provides straightforward role-based instructions on both how to deploy and how use the solution.
So for our customers we are indeed delivering solutions that are designed to resolve specific problems and they have a single price that includes all the required pieces. Customers can define the services in business terms, publish them into an online catalog, automate the fulfillment through self-service, and charge-back or report-back to the business, based on actual consumption. Customers get faster time to value based on a defined and tested configuration of all the pieces. And best of all, the automated fulfillment means that the requests for services can be fulfilled in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee!
The next big step will be to tightly integrate service design capabilities with deployment and monitoring and management of the service. You will be hearing much more about this soon at CA World this November. In the meantime, we have taken a great step forward with enabling automated service provisioning with Automation Suite for Clouds, and CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock.