CA has today announced eight new products, which will be released over the coming months, designed to help business leaders manage their IT infrastructure.

The products fall into two distinct categories: compliance and data centre automation tools.

This suite of releases, which go under the umbrella of CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) initiative, is aimed at helping businesses drive down the costs of IT operations, while delivering securely managed systems, said Colin Bannister, director of strategy at CA.

"Our own research suggests that something like 60 per cent of today's IT budget goes to just keeping the lights on. We think we can make sure that that money is better targeted," he said.

On the compliance side, CA will be releasing updated versions of: Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Manager; Access Control; and Identity Manager. These will be complemented by two new products: Security Compliance Manager and Software Compliance Manager.

These tools are intended to integrate with customers' existing compliance and risk programmes, and the intention, said Bannister, is to provide users with "a single pane of glass" for centralised IT control. Today, many firms struggle to get a comprehensive view of their IT infrastructure, having to rely on multiple management systems to get information, he argued.

The new software compliance tools will help companies establish whether they have the right number of software licences for their user base. "I think on the whole, most companies will find they're over-licensed. Most organisations tend to be inefficient when itgaret comes to leveraging redundant licences – so there are huge potential benefits," said Bannister.

CA faces competition in the GRC market from enterprise application makers such as Oracle and SAP, both of whom offer GRC tools to complement their enterprise resource planning systems.

But Bannister insisted that CA's ability to work in heterogeneous environments would be an advantage, as invariably most firms are not single-vendor shops.

The new automation tools include a new IT Process Manager, as well as updates to CA's Advanced Systems Management, and Event Management and Automation tools.

These products will help firms manage a wide range of IT infrastructure, from mainframes to virtual machines, said Bannister.

The management challenges of virtualisation have been the biggest barrier to its deployment in production systems, said Bannister. "Most companies are striving to reduce complexity, but when you add virtualisation, you're actually making the system more complex. Our aim is to mitigate the impact of that complexity," he said.