CA World 2014: Management Cloud Debuts, Execs Talk DevOps

CA Technologies made a case this week at the CA World 2014 conference for MSPs to make a more aggressive push into the realm of DevOps to help organizations implement digital business strategies.

While there is no such thing as a DevOps market per se, organizations are now being confronted with multiple new IT management challenges, ranging from embracing mobile computing to the rise of a broad set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that are at the foundation of a new application economy.

All that innovation, says Amit Chatterjee, executive vice president for the Enterprise Solutions and Technology Group at CA Technologies, is unleashing a Pandora’s Box of IT management issues that most organizations are ill prepared to cope with. As such, Chatterjee says CA Technologies is looking for partners that can sell a variety of IT management services by leading with the enablement of a business process transformation rather than the attributes of a specific product or technology solution.

Chatterjee concedes that rather than trying to build a single comprehensive practice, MSPs will find it more practical to address specific DevOps issues individually. For example, an IT organization may be more likely to recognize they need help first with application performance monitoring than IT infrastructure management or vice versa. Rather than presenting that organization with a comprehensive service that might be too overwhelming for that organization to consume, Chatterjee says the company’s partners might be more successful approaching the needs of each individual department within the business separately.

But over time Chatterjee says that the company’s partners will be able to deploy a set of federated services enabled by products from CA Technologies. To that end the company this week announced Management Cloud, a collection of IT management frameworks based on existing products and services developed by CA Technologies. The basic goal behind the creation of these frameworks is to make consuming CA products and services simpler to consume.

Going forward CA Technologies hopes to provide most of its services as a set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that CA Technologies is prepared to manage on behalf of partners by deploying them in third-party data centers around the world. However, it also gives MSPs the option of deploying its software in their own data centers if they so choose.

CA Technologies, of course, has a long history of having a rocky relationship with channel partners given the strength of its direct sales force. But Chatterjee says that the digital business opportunity is valued at roughly $5 billion, which he acknowledges the company can’t full address without help from its partners.

There’s no doubt that organizations of all sizes are now trying to manage a dizzying array of technologies that are very well likely to drive them into the arms of MSPs. In fact, in a survey of 1,425 IT and line of business (LOB) executives conducted by CA Technologies finds that of 88 percent already have or plan to adopt a DevOps methodology sometime within the next five years, 51 percent expect to engage a consulting firm to help drive that transition.

Chatterjee contends that the future of those IT environments will be dominated by “API-assembled” applications rather than traditional packaged applications. Further complicating the IT management challenge, Chatterjee also says that most of those applications will consist of “ambient data” that is often beyond the direct control of the internal IT organization. To help address those issues CA Technologies this week also unveiled a number a number of updates to its portfolio of IT management wares, including a new version of its Agile Parallel Development environment that melds service virtualization and API management in a way that make it easier to develop applications.

Additionally, CA Technologies took the wraps off a new CA Mobile App Analytics offering to help improve mobile application performance management and updates to its CA Release Automation software that broadens the classes of applications that tool supports.

Of course, the degree to which also that also translates into IT management services based on products and technologies delivered by CA Technologies being actually consumed remains to be seen. But the chances that MSPs are going to be increasingly asked to help manage all that emerging DevOps chaos is most certainly fairly high.