CA develops all-in-one ASP package

Computer Associates (CA) is preparing to launch an integrated software package that it claims will enable application service providers (ASPs) to set up business in days instead of months.

Speaking exclusively to vnunet, Yogesh Gupta, CA's senior vice president of ebusiness strategy, said the offering will be the first complete package tailored to providing an ASP's software infrastructure.

The suite would use components from CA's Unicenter and eTrust frameworks, and provide host application, virtual private network, firewall and load balancing technology.

Performance availability and fault tolerance will be provided through back-up and recovery services. The third part of the suite would handle customer service functions such as administration, billing and remote troubleshooting.

Gupta predicted that larger companies in Europe would retain core functions internally but would increasingly turn over other functions, such as payroll processing and ecommerce systems, to ASPs.

He said vendors and service providers that do not get involved in the ASP market risk being left behind.

"Establishing a beachhead in this market is more important than waiting and trying to establish the grand scheme of things," said Gupta. "In Europe, large companies and telcos are trying to get into the ASP market in a large scale way."

Martin Brampton, chief analyst at Bloor Research, said: "ASPs need to manage and control systems very effectively, so an integrated package like this should be attractive. CA has quite a good offering and many ASPs will prefer to deal with one supplier - particularly when speed and time to market is of the essence.

"CA can be expected to come up with a reasonable integrated offering and IBM, along with other smaller players, are likely to come back with something similar."

Turning to the future of CA's neural network agent technology, Neugents, Gupta said CA is open to the idea of licensing the technology to third parties. However, he said that to work effectively Neugents need access to lots of data, and therefore need to be used within an information access infrastructure.

Research and development at CA is focusing on how Neugents might be used in security technology such as intrusion detection and antivirus software, said Gupta.

"Using Neugents it might be possible to identify behaviour that looks like a virus and quarantine it. The chief damage caused by the Love bug was due to its rapid spread and this would address that," he added.

"Where the security technology works, no one talks about it."