CA this week plans to unveil a dozen or so updated software applications that the management vendor enhanced to better support IT departments during the economic downturn.

Dubbed Lean IT, the company is building up on its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) with tools that can help cash-strapped IT managers squeeze more from their existing gear and applications. The company, which last week at the RSA conference introduced one new and two updated security management products, plans to unveil a slew of upgrades to its application performance management, service management, project and portfolio management, infrastructure management and recovery management software suites. All the applications have been tweaked to address the economic pain many in IT are facing today, CA officials say.

“CA has focused its massive engineering resources to help enable Lean IT for customers, says David Hurwitz, vice president of solutions marketing at CA. “When investments in IT remain flat or budgets get cut, IT departments need to be able to maximize the value of IT while delivering services at minimal costs.”

For instance, CA Wily APM, which includes CA Wily Introscope and CA Wily Customer Experience Manager (CEM), offers IT managers more insight into transactions as they traverse complex, heterogeneous platforms and middleware layers in large environments. The software performs real-time transaction monitoring, which can provide IT and business managers with visibility into how an application is behaving and help them prioritize tasks.

Industry watchers say the updates across Wily and other management products will help enterprise IT managers connect their management software investments to a revenue stream or cost-cutting efforts. Jasmine Noel, co-founder and principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates, says with the application performance management and service management products CA broadened what it can monitor and made it easier for applications to share service models, which will reduce manual effort.

“IT departments need to be cost-effective and if they are spending money on management products, they will need to be able to show real, hard benefits that help the business break even in such a tough economic climate,” Noel says. “CA’s updates help IT connect management to cost-cutting efforts, prioritize tasks based on business need and reduce manual labor around keeping applications and services available and performing as expected.”

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.