CA Technologies Corporate Blog: Perspectives : data management

What specific actions can you take if you want to implement "consumerization" at your company?

CA Community — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:13:00 GMT

Brian Madden is known throughout the world as an opinionated, super technical, fiercely-independent desktop virtualization expert. He's written several books and over 2,000 articles about desktop and application virtualization. His blog receives millions of visitors per year and is a leading source for conversation, debate, and discourse about the application and desktop virtualization industry. Brian is also the creator of BriForum, the premier independent application delivery technical conference. Engage with Brian Madden via LinkedIn | Twitter | Email

Last week while on the East Coast for meetings, I had a chance to sit down with some CA [Technologies] folks to discuss their initiatives around the consumerization of IT (or consumer-driven IT, as they call it). Since my focus has been on virtual desktops for the past decade, I didn't really know anything about CA [Technologies]. In fact I'd be hard pressed to name a single product of theirs. (Does Unicenter still exist? Or something about backups?) You can imagine that I was a bit surprised (in the good way!) to arrive to a room full of people who all wanted to talk about consumerization.

CA is actually jumping into consumerization big time. What's interesting is that they don't make the sexy stuff that end users see, rather they handle all the boring back-end stuff that actually enable IT shops to deliver consumerization-based services. (Think identity management, security management, data management, etc.) CA's conversation was led by Jackie Kahle (twitter | blog), and we talked about a lot of interesting things over the course of a few hours. (Look for more on that conversation and what specific things CA is doing in the consumerization space in the next few weeks.)

The most interesting part of the meeting was...to read the rest of Brian Madden's post, click here.

CA World 2011 Opens

CA Community — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:30:00 GMT

It’s the morning of the first full day here at CA World 2011 and I could not be more excited that 5,000 of our customers, partners, journalists, and analysts from around the IT industry are in attendance! We have worked energetically over the last few months to ensure that every single attendee gains real, tangible value from the event, and I strongly believe we are off to a great start.

Bill McCracken started things off last night with a panel of industry experts including former United States CIO Vivek Kundra and VCE Chairman Michael Capellas in a compelling industry discussion moderated by former Marketing Executive at Facebook Randi Zucherburg. Their insight into the evolving IT and business landscape set a great tone for CA World 2011.

CEO Bill McCracken welcomes customers, partners, and
employees to CA World 2011.

There seems to be an emerging consensus among our speakers, attendees and exhibitors that we are no longer on the cusp, but instead fully immersed in a transformative moment in IT. Cloud computing has evolved from an abstract promise to an actionable IT and business strategy and for improving the cost structure, service delivery, and business value of IT. Social collaboration has changed the way many organizations interact with their customers and drive productivity. Mobile technology has changed customer and employee expectations of how they can interact with the company, its systems, and its data. In the datacenter, trends from energy management to converged hardware are changing the way IT is sourced and delivered.

Much of that innovation and change is challenging IT to differentiate the business and find new revenue streams. That’s why we choose the concept of ‘IT at the Speed of Business’ for CA World 2011, we felt it really captured the incredible sense of opportunity that IT has to play a strategic role in driving growth, revenue, and competitive advantage. However, as great the opportunity and vision for the future of IT may be, IT staff is tasked with the day to day task overhauling IT infrastructure, tools, processes, and skill sets to actually deliver on a whole new set of expectations.

This morning we’re hearing from Executive Vice President David Dobson on our strategy for partnering with IT departments to overcome these challenges and exceed business and customer expectations. He is discussing our strategy for helping facilitate the move from IT-centric application delivery to a truly business service-centric model of IT, built on a foundation of hybrid cloud. CA Technologies has developed a value roadmap for a single integrated platform built to deliver Business Service Innovation:

Model: The design and deployment of customers’ composite services are optimized through modeling and simulation of performance, integrations, security, capacity requirements and cost—before any significant investment is made.
Assemble: Service resources from mainframe, distributed and virtualized environments—as well as third-party and cloud services—are assembled into service bundles.
Automate: Rapidly developed, customized solutions are automated to orchestrate services across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Assure: Monitoring, predictive analytics and performance optimization are applied across the entire IT value chain, assuring service levels and reliability.
Secure: With security built in at the core, assets and information are protected—and access is intelligently controlled through content and identity awareness
.

“By integrating all of these capabilities on a common platform, we’re able to deliver Business Service Innovation for customers that endows IT with unprecedented speed, innovation, cost/risk efficiencies and performance,” said Dobson.

Tomorrow morning, Peter Griffiths, EVP, Technology and Development Group, will be presenting the CA Technologies vision for the future of SaaS. He will discuss how CA Technologies will be making even the most complex solutions available in highly flexible SaaS models, as well as solutions for enabling our customers and partners to deliver agile, flexible, and cost-effective SaaS offerings to their internal and external customers. CA Technologies is truly committed to being a pioneer in delivering SaaS solutions that provide tangible value to our customers.

We will be posting daily updates over the next few days, so please check back soon to find out what we are doing at CA World 2011 to help our customers and partners deliver greater business value!

Consumer Driven IT in Review, 3rd edition

Jackie Kahle — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:36:00 GMT

Consumer Driven IT marches on, this time in data storage. DropBox was in the news this week, making a play for a bigger share of cloud-based data storage within businesses. They realized that their customers were using DropBox to store corporate data from their workplace and saw an opportunity to reach out to IT departments with a new (and presumably more controllable) offering.

Anyone who has ever suffered through cumbersome corporate data backup solutions recognizes the appeal of using the simple online backup tools you use at home to back up your work data too. In fact, the recent IDC study on consumer driven IT which surveyed more than 1,000 consumers found that 83% of those surveyed have already used, or would like to use, online cloud-based data backup solutions for business purposes. And more than half of the respondents plan to increase their use in the future

IT is being challenged to meet the IT consumer's anytime, anyplace work style and it is not surprising that cloud-based storage is a perfect solution. DropBox and others like Box.net are causing IT managers to act like supply chain managers, sourcing a variety of cloud-based services on behalf of their customers and employees.

Here's what else was in the news the last few weeks:

November 3: ReadWriteWeb is exclusively promoting our new and very funny consumer driven IT cartoon for the next 10 days! RWW is one of the TOP 5 Enterprise 2.0 sites/blogs. Did the cartoon make you laugh? If you like it, please click "+1" and/or share to the social media channel(s) of your choice.

November 2: BYOD risks outweigh the benefits: ISACA Indian survey via TechTarget. Security remains an important consideration for COIT. The ISACA survey finds that 63% of enterprise security incidents can be linked to employees' use of IT assets -35% from use of personal devices for work activities and 28% from use of work devices for personal activities.

October 31: How consumer tech is transforming IT, Christopher Lochhead via CNN/Fortune. The "bizzumer" revolution is on, and it is about consumer-like business applications, not just BYOD.

October 31: Gartner: Time to re-imagine the role of IT This summarizes a recent Gartner keynote from their IT Expo. "This is the era of mass collaboration driven by the consumerization of IT. For an IT leader to thrive in this environment, they must re-imagine their role, and they must lead from the front."

October 27: Dropbox Bids to Find Entry in Businesses, Claire Cain Miller in the New York Times. Consumer Driven IT is driving new opportunities in cloud-based data storage.

October 25: Is your data center ready for the consumerization of IT?, Beth Bacheldor via ITworld. Mobility and devices of all shapes and sizes are in the enterprise so you'd better make sure your data center's equipped.

October 23: How to bypass iPad security in 5 seconds CSOs take note - your employees can learn how to do this on YouTube, no less.

October 19: Consumerization of IT, Well.... , Michael Fauscette via the Enterprise Irregulars. Is the response to the consumerization of IT a parallel "enterprization" of the consumer? You heard it here first!

October 17: Why the Consumerization of IT is a user revolt, Rob Enderle via IT Business Edge. Rob argues that if there were ever a time for IT to get back in touch with its inner user and to reinstate processes that connected internal customers to tools that met both customers' needs and the needs of the corporation, this is that time.

October 14: Moore's Law Driving Consumerization, Data Center Growth, Joseph F. Kovar, CRN. According to Intel's CEO Paul Otellini, Moore's law is still at work and the explosion in the number of transistors being shipped has resulted in 4 billion devices connected to the Internet generating over 300 exabytes of data.

Also NEW this week from CA Technologies:

Visit our enhanced consumer driven IT site and Blog page: View , interact and download great resources and tools from our new site. You will find everything from detailed research, a free assessment tool, a cool new infographic and even real-time polling & fun videos. Our enriched blog page is chock full of experts sharing their opinions on consumer driven IT along with featured information for you like our IDC summary report.