CA unveils cloud management suite

CA's Cloud-Connected Management Suite is based on four new products

LAS VEGAS: CA has unveiled its upcoming Cloud-Connected Management Suite, a set of products designed to help firms manage and optimise their cloud services.

The suite is based on four new products: Cloud Insight, Compose, Orchestrate and Optimize.

Insight, which is based on an existing CA product, Oblicore, will let firms compare and contrast internal and external cloud services; Compose, again based on an existing tool, AppLogic, offers visual technology to build services in the cloud; Optimize lets firms analyse the various options and get better value from them; and Orchestrate helps manage the deployment of the Optimize suggestions.

"The suite helps you manage and optimise the dynamic IT supply chain that cloud is now enabling," said Chris O'Malley, executive vice president of the Cloud Products & Solutions business line at CA Technologies.

Cloud-Connected Management Suite will be closely integrated with another new tool from CA, Cloud Commons. This community web site, unveiled on Sunday at CA World, is designed to act as a Trip Advisor or IMDB for the cloud world. The site will offer user ratings on hundreds of different cloud services, allowing firms to quickly get a view on the best products for their organisation.

Vince Re, chief architect of CA's Cloud Services line, demonstrated Cloud Insight to show how it could benefit business users and IT workers.

The first example was of a 'rogue' business user who had installed a new service on to the company network. The main view of Cloud Insight is a graph showing the organisation's own score for a particular cloud service against other companies'. According to CA, the Service Measurement Index score is based on standard metrics from monitoring tools such as CA Nimsoft.

Re then showed how an IT manager could access Cloud Commons from the Insight tool to find out more about the rogue application, and compare it to the company's official app and other available products to see if there is a better option out there.

Re emphasised the collaborative aspect of Cloud Insight, allowing business users to have more input into services deployed by the organisation. Rather than the IT team simply blocking access or uninstalling non-authorised apps, in CA's view there is greater benefit from investigating business users' chosen tools to see how they can improve operations across the firm.

In the demonstration example, the user's rogue app scored higher than the current official collaboration app, and Cloud Insight also directed the IT manager to a premium version that was top rated. Through the tool, the IT manager could then set up a pilot of the premium version and get user feedback before deciding whether to deploy that instead.

"Before IT blindly adopts this new tool, you can double check and see what is better still. You can constrain your search to ones that are a best fit for your environment, for example only apps available for AppLogic," Re said. "It's very Web 2.0, very collaborative, lots of feedback coming from users."

However, firms interested in the products face a six-month wait and no pricing information is available yet. Cloud Insight and Compose are set for release at the end of October, while Optimize will not appear until next April, with Orchestrate coming the following quarter.

CA said the reason for launching Cloud Commons now, six months before Cloud Insight and Compose, is so that there is enough user data available on the different cloud services to make the product useful.