CA Technologies Paints Agile SaaS Future

The future of enterprise IT will increasingly be defined by the deployment of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications across both public and private clouds. Putting the framework in place to manage everything from developing, accessing, management and securing those applications in the era of Big Data is the strategic opportunity that CA Technologies, under the leadership of newly appointed CEO Mike Gregoire, is heading.

Speaking at the CA World 2013 conference, Gregoire, who was appointed four months ago, says that CA Technologies envisions a world where IT organizations will be able to deploy SaaS applications that they have the option of deploying in a public cloud or a private cloud. That cloud, says Gregoire, can be managed by either an internal IT organization or external provider. The important thing, says Gregoire, is to not only give IT organizations options in the cloud, but do so in a way that allows them to change their minds about how they want to deploy any application in the future.

As part of an effort to add credibility to its commitment to these areas, CA Technologies today announced it acquired Nolio, a provider of application release management software that is delivered as a service. It also bought Layer 7 Technologies, a provider of a platform for securely managing application programming interfaces, in addition to unfurling CA Mobile Device Management, a mobile device and application management service that is delivered via the cloud.

According to Gregoire, CA Technologies is building out a foundational layer of software called the CA Cloud Service Delivery Platform, which separates data, application logic and presentation in a way that makes it easier to dynamically shift applications across different classes of cloud computing environments. The first applications built on top of this platform are CA CloudMinder for managing cloud application access, the Nimsoft service desk and a newly updated CA Application Performance Management (APM) application — all of which are today delivered as a SaaS application.

Gregoire also says that CA Technologies will aggressively move to embrace agile application development methodologies that will allow it to update applications every quarter. One of the primary benefits of that approach, says Gregiore, is that it takes the overhead associated with deploying and updating applications off the shoulders of internal IT and moves it on to the application service provider.

Recent acquisitions notwithstanding, Gregiore also pledged that, going forward, future CA Technologies product development will be based largely on internal organic efforts.

Gregoire says CA Technologies is committed to allowing IT leaders to become brokers by giving them the most amount of flexibility in terms of where applications are deployed and ultimately managed. The biggest challenge right now, says Gregiore, is that enterprise IT has not yet caught up with fundamental changes to the way applications need to be developed, which at the moment is leading to a sense of lost control across the entire enterprise.