10 Cloud Computing Companies To Watch. CA Technologies Essay

CA Technologies formerly known as CA, Inc is one of the largest and leading software enterprises in the world and it is headquartered at New York, USA. It is responsible for the creation of software that gives many companies an upper hand in the current application economy. CA software is designed to help companies and industries acquire productivity and growth through extensive and top notch CA software and solutions. History of the company The company was founded in 1976 by Charles Wang. Charles had been born in Shanghai but moved to the United States at the age of eight years old. He studied math and physics at Queens College. After graduating, he took up a trainee job as a computer programmer for a small computer service agency in New York. The agency was responsible for marketing software for the Swiss firm Computer Associates. The Swiss company wanted to expand its market in the USA and Wang saw an opportunity for a business enterprise with the Swiss company. Wang along with his friend and partner Russ Artzt created their own company. With only two partners, Wang opened up an office that marketed the Swiss products. The company did not do so well until when they developed CA-SORT. The program was designed to help computers sort through data quickly and economically. The program gave a similar IBM program stiff competition and majority of IBM clients later shifted to CA’s program. This was a great leap of success for the CA Company. The company expanded and started to recruit and hire more people. In 1980, Wang and partners bought out the Swiss parent company and then they made the company public in 1981. As from the moment the company went public it began to program and focus on expansion through acquisitions. It bought Capex Corporation, Stewart P. Orr Associates, Information Unlimited Software, Sorcim, Viking Data Systems, Uccel, Cullinet, On-Line Software International, Inc., CSMI (Computer Management Sciences, Inc.), Platinum Technology International, Layer 7 Technologies, Applied Data Research, Cheyenne Software, Johnson Systems, Arkay Computer, and many more. It also bought Top Secret, from CGA Computer, a program designed as a computer security system. It later on purchased Integrated System Software Corp. and Software International, both being application software. The later being responsible for financial application and the former for graphics softw are. Wang resigned as the CEO of the company on 2000 and his position was taken up by Sanjay Kumar. John Swainson was the next CEO in the company but retired at the end of the year 2009. CA technologies announced William E. McCracken as the chairman of the board and the chief executive officer on January 28, 2010. He was replaced by Michael P. Gregoire on January 7, 2013 who is the current chairman of the board and the chief executive officer at CA Technologies and Russell M. Artzt as the current Vice Chairman. Products and services CA Technologies have a number of products and services, mostly software, which is designed to transform businesses and enables customers to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Their main area of expertise lies on three major areas, Cloud, Mainframe, and Mobile. They have four main portfolios, the ca Securecenter. Ca Opscenter, ca Devcenter, and the ca Intellicenter. Its main services include project and portfolio management, application performance management, infrastructure management, security management, cloud services, data center automation and virtualization, and service management. These services are distinctively placed and categorized in the four main portfolios named above. The ca Securecenter portfolio enables and secures the open enterprise by authenticating and securing access for the right users on any device, anywhere while providing a superior customer experience. It has a number of featured products such as the CA Identity Manager SaaS, CA Single Sign-On, CA Sign-On SaaS, CA Advanced Authentication, CA API Gateway, CA API Developer Portal, CA Mobile API Gateway, CA Identity Manager, CA Identity Governance, and the CA Privileged Identity Manager. All these products are optimally designed to offer maximum security conveniently to their customers. CITATION CAI15 l 1033 (CA Securecenter) CA Opscenter portfolio provides tools that manage and monitor performance and availability, giving you the keys to ensuring your customers are up and running. Some of their products include CA Unified Infrastructure Management, CA 1 Tape Management, CA Allocate DASD Space and Placement, CA App Synthetic Monitor, CA Application Delivery Analysis, CA Capacity Managemen t, CA Bind Analyzer for DB2 for z/OS, CA Big Data Infrastructure Management, CA Automation Point, and the CA Application Performance, etc. CITATION CAO15 l 1033 (CA Opscenter) The ca Devcenter portfolio is designed to develop high quality applications faster by leveraging tools that create virtual integrations, enable parallel development and continuous testing. The ca Devcenter portfolio is designed deploy applications from development through production with automated orchestration. Some of the products it features are the CA Service Virtualization, CA 2E, CA Application Lifestyle Conductor, CA Application Test, CA Automation Suite for Clouds, CA Cloud Manager Powered by ServiceMesh, CA Test, CA Configuration Automation, CA Continuous Application Insight, CA Data Finder, and many more. These products are intended to deliver innovation to market faster with higher quality. CITATION CAD15 l 1033 (CA DevCenter) The ca Intellicenter portfolio has the software needed to make the right portfolio decisions and gain a holistic view of IT services and assets, enabling your business to manage the business of IT. Their featured products include; CA Cloud Service Management, CA Executive Playbook, CA Agile Planning, CA PPM, CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog, CA IT Assets Manager, CA Business Service Insight, CA On Demand Portal, and the Xtraction for CA Service Management. These products seek to drive productivity and provide a superior IT Serve Management experiences in the businesses that invest on them. CITATION CAI151 l 1033 (CA Intellicenter)Competition facing the company’s products A lot of software related companies have invested in cloud computing services including CA technologies. Their cloud computing, CA Cloud manager, faces competition from other platforms, such as Microsoft that offers Azure, Amazon that is offering the Amazon Web Services, AT&T that is offering Synaptic Hosting, Enomaly that is currently offering Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) and Rackspace that offers Rackspace Cloud also referred to as â€Å"Mosso†. These services are mostly used by Web developers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. CITATION Jon09 l 1033 (Brodkin, 2009) There are numerous suppliers of project and portfolio management (PPM) software. Companies like 4c Systems, Antura, Artemis, IBM, Oracle, BMC Software, Cambridge Systematics, Davies Consulting, etc offer different PPM software. The 4c System offers 4c Portfolio Intelligence, Antura offers Antura Projects, IBM offers Rational Focal Point, Oracle offers Crystal Ball, BMC offers IT Servi ce Management, Cambridge Systematics offers Prioritas and Davies Consulting offers AIS. All these companies offer this PPM software designs that are designed to assist companies in efficiently identifying and managing projects. CA technologies offers Clarity PPM which is successfully used by many corporations but also faces too much completion from other PPM providers. Infrastructure Management software (IM) is a system designed to manage essential operation components, such as policies, processes, equipment, data, human resource and external contacts for overall effectiveness. It has a number of vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and CA technologies. Some of the competing systems include SAP IT IM, Data Center IM, which offer major competition to CA Infrastructure Management. CITATION Mar07 l 1033 (Rouse, 2007) Application Performance Management (APM) is a system designed to monitor real time customer experience and goes ahead to compare the performance deprivation back to the system measures. CA technologies are responsible for CA PPM. There are various APM systems that offer stiff competition to the CA APM. Some of these APM systems vendors include; INETCO, AppNeta, Riverbed, Oracle, HP, Compuware and also CA. the various CA systems in the market that are currently competing with CA APM system are; New Relic, Foglight, Magic Quadran t, and SpyglassTools that is a Java Application Monitoring APM Competitors in the market Every company experiences competition, in one way or the other. The competition can be from within or from outside. Majority of the competition that most corporations face is from other rival organizations. CA Inc. like any normal corporation has its own competition in the existing market. Some of the top competitors include BMC Software, Inc., Compuware Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and VMware, Inc. Corporations in competition BMC Software, Inc. provides IT management solutions and services. It has a wide array of products and services that it offers on its portfolio. These services include remedy IT service management suite, big data management, Cloud computing software, data center automation services, IT operations services, ITSM consulting services, workload automation, and the process alignment service among others. BMC is headquartered in Houston, Texas, in the US. It caters to a wide range of customers such as banks, institutions of learning, government agencies, system integrators, hospitals, retailers, distributors, manufacturers, financial service providers, telecommunication companies, and resellers. Oracle Corporation is one of the leading corporations that provide enterprise software, computer hardware, products and services. The company offers various services such as Oracle database, middleware software, cloud infrastructure, application software, and hardware systems. The company provides its services to a wide variety of customers such as the healthcare industry, oil and gas professional services, life sciences, financial services industry, aerospace and defense industry, natural resources and chemicals industry. The company is headquartered in Redwood City in the U.S. the company mainly focuses on expanding through acquisition of companies, products, services and technologies. This way it would strengthen and widen its customer base and create and generate more innovations. Compuware Corporation provides services, software and practices for IT corporations globally. It also provides professional technical services in areas such as performance engineering, mobile application development and system modernization. Its headquarters are in Detroit, Michigan in the US. The company provides its services and products through segment. These segments include Application Performance Management, Mainframe, Uniface, Changepoint, Professional Service and Covisint Application Services. VMware, Inc. is a supplier of cloud infrastructure and virtualization. The group operates on three main and major product groups; Software-Defined Data Center, Hybrid Cloud computing and End-User Computing. The Software-Defined Data Center is a virtualization platform designed to enable the aggregation of e devices, multiple servers, storage devices and networks. The Hybrid Cloud enables clients to extend tools, skills, networking and security models across all grounds. The End-User Computing product is designed to fully secure access to applications and data from any given devices at any given locations. Its main headquarters are in Palo Alto, California in the US. The company also focuses on extending its margins through acquisition of other similar technology oriented companies. Case study on CA technologies The CA Technologies has provided its services extensively to different industries and corporations. Its services are used by banks, insurance companies, financial service providers, health care institutions, technology companies, and telecommunication providers. These different sectors use and maximize the CA resources and services to compete against other rival industries. Banks and other financial institutions and service providers are equipped with the security management applications designed by the company. This ensures safety of their clients’ information and valuables. If their data are hacked or accessed without authority and permission they may face the risk of losing their customers and will incur major losses in the long run. So as to avoid such majority of the banks and financial service providers such as insurance companies, utilize these security applications. The more advanced the security systems, the more clients and customers it attracts. For an organization to attract more clients and be able to provide extensive services, it ought to have a clear ad defined strategy. This is achieved through the use of a project portfolio management (PPM) system. This system assists companies in effectively planning and investing in the right projects. If the companies use an excellent and superior PPM system, it would have an upper hand advantage against rival and competing companies. With all the software and applications that CA technologies offer, it is easy to see why it is one of the leading technology industries in the world. References 1033 Brodkin, J. (2009, May 18). 10 Cloud Computing Companies To Watch. Retrieved March 05, 2015, from NETWORKWORLD: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2268033/virtualization/10-cloud-computing-companies-to-watch.html CA DevCenter. (n.d.). Retrieved MArch 05, 2015, from CA Technologies: http://www.ca.com/gb/devcenter.aspx CA Intellicenter. (n.d.). Retrieved March 05, 2015, from CA Technologies: http://www.ca.com/gb/intellicenter.aspx CA Opscenter. (n.d.). Retrieved March 04, 2015, from CA Technologies: http://www.ca.com/gb/opscenter.aspx CA Securecenter. (n.d.). Retrieved March 05, 2015, from CA Technologies: http://www.ca.com/gb/securecenter.aspx Rouse, M. (2007, June). Infrastructure Management (IM). Retrieved March 05, 2015, from TechTarget: http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/infrastructure-management Source document