IT Infrastructure Performance is Business Performance: Trends Analysis

Big things are happening at CA World 2013. Whether you’re joining us in Las Vegas or back at the office, we’re collecting the best of CA World news and highlights to share with everyone on April 23. We will discuss the best of the event so far and what we expect to see over the remainder of the show.

Join our host, Jason Meserve and Tim Smith, product manager with the Service Assurance team, at CA World as they report on the best highlights of the show, including news, announcements, and exciting discoveries. Stay tuned for this on-the-beat report!

Go big. IT with impact!

This webcast has been developed with IT leaders in the healthcare industry in mind and will focus on key industry issues including: How do you solve the most perplexing problem in Healthcare IT – keeping IT budgets flat or lower while delivering innovation?
What if you could lower costs by transforming the way you develop and test applications and monitor actual application performance? What if this approach also enabled you to test your interfaces into the new HIXs in time to meet tight deadlines (Health Information Exchanges)?

Join CA Technologies and Harris Corporation on February 28 for an interactive webcast and learn how CA Technologies is supporting healthcare organizations and has become a leader in one of the newest and most compelling technologies in the area of Service Virtualization while continuing to lead in delivering Application Performance Monitoring.

In many IT organizations, those tasked with building applications are separated from the production teams that actually care for the live applications in operations. This typical, yet siloed approach can negatively impact your ability to innovate quickly by spending time on firefighting problems and escalating issues between teams – creating an unproductive, digital hot potato game. What’s needed is a modern DevOps approach that enables you to introduce application quality early in the lifecycle and knock down the silos between the application development and operations teams to achieve better efficiency, accelerate time to market and boost application quality.

Join Julie Craig, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) on February 28 for an informative discussion about using APM in pre-production in addition to your production environments; the implications, key considerations for organizations and how it can have a major impact on your business success and revenue. Hear real world examples from Melissa Sargeant, Sr. Director and Service Assurance Evangelist at CA Technologies, of the collaborative, resource and cost benefits of using APM in pre-production.

Despite the maturity of the market, Enterprise Network Management Systems (ENMS) solutions continue to play a vital role in today’s large enterprise, and not just in older/mature IT shops.

In Enterprise Management Associates’ (EMA) Radar Report, 16 current ENMS solutions coming from 15 vendor providers were reviewed and compared according to a broad range of measures regarding both product strength and overall cost efficiency, as well as in terms of the overall strength of the vendors themselves.

CA Technologies Infrastructure Management solution was ranked as a Value Leader, a distinction for solutions that achieved the best combinations of product strength and cost efficiency. EMA also deemed CA IM worthy of special recognition as having Best Extensibility – Large Deployments. CA Technologies customers raved specifically about how they appreciated capabilities within CA’s IM solution for adding, testing, and certifying new management interfaces, without requiring direct services or support from CA Technologies.

Join, EMA analyst and ENMS Radar author, Jim Frey on a February 26, as he discusses the research he conducted on the ENMS solutions featured in the report and his findings in CA’s IM offering.

Regardless of industry, the demand on IT continues to grow- across all IT environments. But how can IT meet the needs of the business, drive innovation, and ensure the availability of both new and old applications with either flat or decreasing budgets? The need for IT to become more efficient at providing services to end users is no longer a luxury, it’s an absolute requirement.
Predictive Reliability provides visibility into transactions across various environments, enabling you to determine future requirements and the resources needed to meet those demands. You’ll be able to answer questions like, how efficiently are we using our resources? Is there waste within our data center? How can we repurpose resources and perform the necessary mediation to improve user experience?
Join us for this informational discussion with Kathy Hickey, Paul Peterson, and Jeremy Rossbach.

As a service provider, you are constantly looking for ways to deploy new cloud services faster, making smart infrastructure investment choices, and looking to help on-board customers more quickly into their public/private cloud environments.

Capacity management plays a critical role in order for you to be certain that you can meet current and future demands of your smart cloud customers.

Join this webcast and hear more about how some major service providers use capacity management to:
- Ramp up new services to advice customers on how to optimize their current IT environments and plan for the future
- Provide customers with trending, historic data with correlated intelligence between response time and cost
- Better manage internal changes and accommodate growth

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear how capacity management has evolved into a critical tool for business and IT planning to help prepare your business for the cloud.

“Supporting these applications requires skills we don’t have.”
“Our applications are unstable.”
“We had ten people on a 32-hour conference call.”
“We can’t get less than 30-second response time.”

Surprisingly, these comments weren’t dug out of a vault from interviews conducted with IT directors 5, 7 or more years ago. These concerns, these revenue impacting struggles were published in an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) research study conducted about APM in the IT Enterprise in November 2012.

Why is ensuring optimal application performance still so elusive?

Today’s IT organizations are discovering that managing modern, complex applications is an expensive, time-consuming and often frustrating proposition.

Furthermore, it is only when customer expectations aren’t met that IT is on the front lines, yet, this EMA report finds that calls from users is still the most common way IT is alerted that applications aren’t performing as expected.

Join the author of this study, Julie Craig, along with CA Technologies Jason Meserve as they discuss the research results and dig further into the conclusions in her paper, “The Impact of Application Performance and Availability on your Business – and Your Customers”.

A recent CA Technologies commissioned survey of senior infrastructure, systems and operations decision-makers, uncovered some interesting – and a few surprising - trends in both the priorities for IT management as well as the challenges they face in converged infrastructure management for Fortune 1000 organizations.

This study exposes an intersection of priorities for the next 12 months with concerns over short-comings that many organizations have yet to conquer. Additionally, we’ve been able to gauge of the level of confidence in organizations’ own abilities to deliver an exceptional infrastructure and application experience to their users.

Join us on January 17th at 1pm EST for an informative review of the trends and a discussion on where these priorities and short-comings intersect. Receive insight from Dr. Jim Metzler, of Ashton Metzler and Associates as he compares his own research and experience with the survey results and hear from CA Technologies Infrastructure Management Advisor, Steven Guthrie, who will discuss how these trends translate to the priorities you will be considering as you begin planning your approach to attacking your infrastructure management challenges.

Are you considering converged infrastructure as the platform for a private cloud initiative? Or should you be evaluating public cloud providers to offload your commodity services so you can focus more on innovative IT projects that drive business growth? How do you know how much hardware you need? How do you modernize application architectures and platforms to support business growth?

An essential step to answer these questions starts with capacity management. Join this webcast to learn how to:
• Use predictive analytics to tell you where you can put virtual workloads while ensuring application performance so you can overcome virtual stall.
• Combine real-world performance data and financial information with modeling, simulation and automation to project future performance and service levels of business services on converged infrastructure platforms or public cloud environment
• Use capacity management to form a strategy for platform application migration to a cloud computing environment on converged infrastructure or via public cloud providers

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear directly from domain experts on how to use capacity management to harness the cloud.

Listen to this IDC global DCIM survey webcast and learn about the challenges IT and Facilities professionals face as they seek to drive innovation and gain more value from their datacenter investments.

Learn more about:
• What problems have occurred in data centers over the past 12 months?
• What has been the greatest factors limiting effective use of datacenter capacity?
• What challenges are your peers experiencing using different tools to manage different areas of the data center?

Die steigende Komplexität und permanente Veränderungen bei heutigen Anwendungen verhindern häufig die besten Ansätze der IT Teams Agilität zu erreichen. Service Virtualization beseitigt die Einschränkungen bei der Entwicklung verteilter Anwendungen und deren Testphase, wie z.B. Zugang zu Datenbanken, 3rd Pary und ERP-Systemen, Mainframes, und vieles mehr.

Jens Dollenbacher erklärt unter Verwendung realer Beispiele, wie On-Demand Virtual Service Environment (VSE) teure produktionsähnliche Testumgebungen ersetzen kann. Diese VSEs eliminieren die üblichen Abhängigkeiten zwischen service-orientierten Anwendungen und externen Serviceprovidern, die agile Softwareentwicklung verhindern, indem sie es ermöglichen gleichzeitig an mehreren Releases zu arbeiten und leistungsfähigere Anwendungen schneller und günstiger bereitstellen können.

Follow along with two IT teams in this animated short story video where we see how two IT teams with very similar challenges in problems that require Infrastructure Management solutions actually are very different in how they want to use and interact with their infrastructure management solutions.

Easy to use based on what and how you want to use it means different things to different teams.

A recent ca.com poll shows that 45% of respondents still don’t understand the meaning of the term DevOps. If this new IT discipline is so misunderstood, why are so many organizations using it as a mantra for innovation? DevOps helps organizations to break down the silos between development and production teams to improve application quality early in the lifecycle, accelerate delivery of new applications and free up IT resources from daily firefighting to produce new revenue-generating applications and fuel innovation.

Join CA Technologies DevOps experts for a discussion on how you can optimize the application lifecycle through improved testing, capacity planning and application performance management.

Industry research reports that most IT shops use only 18-20% of their CPU Capacity. A capacity management solution will help you identify opportunities for consolidation or virtualization, maximize VM saturation and realize the potential savings. Know with certainty how applications will behave after the migration to virtualization, freeing you to make those changes with confidence.

Join this webcast to learn how you can utilize capacity management to:
• Right size virtual and physical infrastructures according to workloads
• Size and plan virtualization projects, platform upgrades or cloud migrations
• Leverage a hardware model library to compare alternative infrastructures including Cisco, VCE, vBlock, Dell, HP, IBM and more.

IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like Mergers & Acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the datacenter, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues.

While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade. The impact is that business services dependent on that infrastructure suffer, and users experience longer response times, unavailable applications and unacceptable performance. Lack of predictability and uncertainty has caused many IT organizations to suffer “VM Stall,” meaning they have been unable to advance to a strategic deployment of virtualization and achieve expected levels of consolidation. IT must understand the impact of change on the infrastructure to ensure performance. Without that insight IT is unwilling to take that risk.

To proactively plan for capacity in order to support mission critical business services, IT must assess historical data captured by eHealth and couple it with predictive analytics. This allows you to efficiently manage what the actual capacity utilization of that business service is and what it will be as the workload grows, the infrastructure virtualizes, or other changes are introduced. Given this predictive capability, IT could effectively foresee capacity issues in the future to assess alternatives and provision the right infrastructure when needed.

Your company has already decided that adopting cloud computing in some form is a smart business decision – enabling IT departments to reduce costs and enable efficiency will ultimately pave the way to create an innovative IT organization. But these nagging, yet important questions remain: How do you manage the scope and complexity of a private cloud? How does the IT department adapt to the cultural shifts that come with the adoption of cloud computing?

Join Dr. Jim Metzler, Distinguished Research Fellow and Co-Founder, Ashton Metzler & Associates on November 28 at 8am PST/11am EST for a discussion on the latest publication on cloud computing, The 2012 Cloud Networking Report. Dr. Metzler will discuss the challenges and solutions that are associated with cloud networking, including his assessment on what cloud computing means today, what has changed over the past year, and where it is likely to evolve in the near term.

At the recent CA Gen events across Europe, we presented an exciting new addition to the CA portfolio with our Service Virtualisation solution. CA LISA simulates the behaviour of unavailable, costly to access and undeveloped applications, whether they are connected to an ERP system, a mainframe, middleware, 3rd party protocols or more. If you are interested in seeing exactly how CA LISA creates a Virtual Service, builds an entire Virtual Service Environment, delivers continuous integration testing, and helps identify defects earlier in the development lifecycle, this webinar will give you all the answers. There is also a Q & A session at the end when you can address your particular requirements or queries.

Discover how a new technology and approach to these issues can remove test system access constraints, reduce hardware and license costs, and speed up time-to-market.