CA touts Concord, Aprisma support

BOSTON - Computer Associates last week sent its big guns to a local user event in an effort to show support for its newest customers and detail CA's commitment to product integration and development.

About 400 Concord Communications and Aprisma Management Technologies customers got to hear firsthand from CA President and CEO John Swainson and Alan Nugent, general manager of the Enterprise Systems Management business unit, who delivered separate keynote speeches, how the management heavyweight plans to bring the technology it acquired this year into its Unicenter software suite.

In June, CA completed its acquisition of network performance management vendor Concord and its eHealth Suite. In the process, CA also picked up Aprisma , which Concord acquired in February, and the former Cabletron company's Spectrum network fault management and root-cause analysis software.

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BOSTON - Computer Associates last week sent its big guns to a local user event in an effort to show support for its newest customers and detail CA's commitment to product integration and development.

About 400 Concord Communications and Aprisma Management Technologies customers got to hear firsthand from CA President and CEO John Swainson and Alan Nugent, general manager of the Enterprise Systems Management business unit, who delivered separate keynote speeches, how the management heavyweight plans to bring the technology it acquired this year into its Unicenter software suite.

In June, CA completed its acquisition of network performance management vendor Concord and its eHealth Suite. In the process, CA also picked up Aprisma , which Concord acquired in February, and the former Cabletron company's Spectrum network fault management and root-cause analysis software.

CA, one of the top four management software makers in terms of market share alongside BMC Software, HP and IBM, says its Unicenter systems, mainframe, database and application technologies will benefit from the network expertise Concord and Aprisma bring to the table.

"With Unicenter NSM, [Network and Systems Management], the N should have been lowercase because of our weaknesses in the network," Nugent says.

CA shared with attendees a road map of its Unicenter r11 products, which it will further detail at its annual CA World conference in Las Vegas next month. The company is expected to announce technology to manage virtualized networks in new releases, for example. But to start, CA last week said eHealth and Spectrum are being developed to have the same look and feel, to employ similar workflows and to support the same platforms and vendor gear across the two products. That integration will be carried over to Unicenter, as well, CA says.

"We are developing integrations while also keeping the products modular enough to help customers purchase tools separately but use them together," says Tom Hayes, director of product marketing at CA. "We will determine what we keep from each product's technology stack based on performance and customer input."

CA says Concord and Aprisma shared about 100 customers, which can immediately take advantage of the integration CA developed between the two technologies. A software module will be built into eHealth and Spectrum applications going forward and is being tested with beta customers. In the future the two products and CA's own Unicenter will be reshaped to use the same database, polling and discovery mechanisms, for example, in the core underlying technology.

According to Nugent, CA invests about $2 billion in its Enterprise Systems Management and Business Service Optimization divisions, which oversee various Unicenter products and are among five business units announced earlier this year under the new direction of Swainson. Nugent says CA intends to show Concord and Aprisma customers that CA's bad reputation for customer service is a thing of the past.

"We have to walk the talk. We will be seeing customers, hearing their concerns and answering their questions," Nugent says.

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