Last month's CA World show in Las Vegas was light on product announcements and news compared with previous events, but it still provided a valuable insight into where the IT management software specialist is heading. CA used the event to tell customers about the progress of its Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategy, which was launched in November 2005 with the aim of simplifying the management of IT within an enterprise.

CA announced it had split the EITM strategy into three areas: governance; security; and management. It also introduced a Unified Service Model under which it plans to offer customers pre-integrated solutions in areas such as project and portfolio management, and network and voice management.

"This year's show was about EITM in a pragmatic sense; it was about EITM as an architecture and how we deliver it into solutions," explains Vince Re, CA's senior vice-president of development and chief architect. "We needed to look at how to rationalise CA's many products so that customers could understand the roadmap. We're trying to distribute them through a smaller number of high-level solutions."
This approach requires CA to develop partnerships with IT consulting and services providers such as Accenture and EDS. "We need to help customers solve their problems with CA products or a mixture of CA and third-party products. It doesn't go down well with CIOs if we tell them to rip out technology they've just deployed," Re says.

CA also plans to exploit the current interest in virtualisation technologies. "With the CIOs I talk to, virtualisation always comes up in the first five minutes," Re says.

"We've got tools in the Unicenter space to do management of virtual images and fault management. We now need to look at how to virtualise software delivery and map it to what technology is there, and how to create a standardised service model."

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model is another area CA is entering. "We've done a couple of pilot projects, but it's felt more like an outsourcing model. With IT management and security, it'll take a little bit for customers to feel comfortable but I think SaaS has a great future at CA," Re says.

CA is planning to approach the on-demand, hosted market in two distinct ways. The first will be the standard way: offering CA products, such as its helpdesk tools, as a service. The other will be providing on-demand vendors with services to offer to their customers.

"Big players like Salesforce.com might want an identity management service for when its customers' users log on to the corporate network and that could flow through Salesforce apps," Re says.

CA is also looking at identity management and security solutions for Web 2.0 applications. "Security is one of the biggest focuses here. The needs of enterprises and consumers are getting closer together. We're getting to a point where consumers are asking how they can be secure," Re says. "There's also a looser coupling between enterprise and consumer boundaries. How does the customer know what is being provided by CA or other partners?"

About Vince Re
Vince Re is senior vice-president of development and chief architect at CA, where he is responsible for overall technical architecture across all products.
He is a member of CA's Senior Leadership Team and is a founding member of CA's Council for Technical Excellence.
Re joined CA in 1984.