CA to bring smart agents to e-comm apps

ISLANDIA, N.Y. - Computer Associates last week shed new light on its plans to deliver predictive reasoning technology that should make it easier for companies to manage networks and online business transactions.

CA has been talking about its Neugent software agents for at least a year and a half, but only last week started to get down to specifics. The company says it will deliver Neugents for its line of e-commerce and security applications as well as for a host of third-party products. CA has Neugents in the works for everything from Unix to Microsoft Exchange to 3Com Palm handheld devices to routers.

The first Neugent shipped by CA monitors Windows NT systems. The company also offers a tool kit that lets customers roll their own Neugents designed to work with CA's Unicenter: The Next Generation management platform.

Neugents, based on neural network technology, learn from experience so they can spot potential problems with applications, networks or devices and notify end users or network managers.

CA plans to highlight its first slew of Neugents next spring at the company's annual customer conference in New Orleans. However, CA declined to detail when its Neugents will ship.

Among the Neugents that could be on display are those that will come as options with CA's assorted financial and supply-chain products, which are sold through the company's recently formed InterBiz e-commerce division. The Neugents for e-commerce applications will help companies better diagnose buying patterns, delinquent accounts and inventory levels.

Some longtime CA customers are intrigued.

"This could give us a better ability to forecast sales," says Dawne Luetscher, director of IS at Arrow Group Industries in Wayne, N.J., which uses CA's MK Group supply-chain application for issuing reports and managing transactions and inventory. Arrow Group sells storage buildings to customers such as Sears and Home Depot.

If a Neugent module can scour public information such as U.S. economic reports or Moody's bond ratings with Arrow Group's sales and customer lists, it might aid in predicting sales, Leutscher says.

CA last week also announced it is building its artificial-intelligence technology, which can provide predictions in a 3-D visual form - into the company's Jasmine ii application development environment.

The Jasmine ii tool kit, now in beta testing, lets developers build a server-based repository to store data objects mapped from applications and databases built on object-oriented programming technologies, including Java and C++.