CA Service Management Enables Intelligent Alignment of IT Operations With Business Requirements

LAS VEGAS, Nov. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CA WORLD -- CA today announced CA Service Management, an end-to-end best practices solution that enables IT organizations to intelligently align operations and decision- making with business requirements, while providing new visibility into IT financial and operational performance.

CA Service Management combines Unicenter Service Intelligence, a new web- based executive level dashboard, with new releases of seven service management products to support every aspect of service management -- from the handling of service requests from business users and the appropriate provisioning of those services through ongoing control of service delivery and cost.

Delivering on CA's vision for Enterprise IT Management, CA Service Management leverages the CA Integration Platform to seamlessly link all service management processes, apply a single view of all assets to those processes, and automate responses to all business requests and infrastructure problems. This enables IT organizations to define, automate and unify the entire service management lifecycle in order to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of the business.

"As one of the leading financial services groups in the UK, Friends Provident is very proactive when it comes to controlling costs and standardizing processes," said Andy Whiting, head of IT Production Services, Friends Provident. "With CA's Service Management solution, we have the ability to define and automate processes that meet ITIL standards, which drives significant gains in productivity, savings and quality. CA's shared common management database will enable us to access and analyze reliable and relevant data about our services, assets, and systems to identify additional savings opportunities. With CA's solutions, we hope to apply the principles with which we run our financial business to the running of our integrated service desk."

CA Service Management supports every aspect of the service lifecycle, including:

* Demand Management - provides a "shopping experience" for business users, presenting IT service offerings in terms they can easily understand and providing a single point-of-contact between IT and end users. It enables IT to give business insight into the costs and performance levels associated with services to improve alignment and set clear expectations, thus enhancing IT governance. * Enterprise Change Management - manages both operational and application change processes from initiation to validation in order to control risk and fulfill compliance requirements. An intuitive, graphical tool enables IT organizations to model complex change workflows across all IT management disciplines. It facilitates the implementation of best practices for identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, verifying and controlling all changes to safeguard service levels and meet compliance goals. * Service Level Management - enables IT organizations to measure service levels using business-based metrics, rather than purely technical or operational ones. With this information, IT can ensure that the needs of the business are met and that its resources are applied where they are most needed. * Incident and Problem Management - drives integrated processes that are based on best practices such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Through highly scalable support and automated response mechanisms, customers can define support policies and track support performance based on those policies. This enables auditing of IT processes for compliance. * Service Costing - provides flexible, activity-based costing for meaningful distribution of IT costs and unparalleled visibility into IT consumption. By automatically allocating costs and accurately reporting on consumption in real time, it empowers business users to select and manage services based on desired capabilities, service levels and costs and helps align IT costs with business needs.

"IT organizations must always manage services in the context of the business in order to ensure that its people, processes and technology deliver optimum value to the bottom line," said Jacob Lamm, general manager of Business Service Optimization at CA. "CA Service Management enables them to achieve this goal by integrating processes that are currently fragmented and by providing greater visibility into key financial and operational metrics."

Controlling Costs and Managing Service Delivery

CA Service Management provides a business interface to IT services via a service catalog that integrates with CA and third-party software to calculate the complete costs of service delivery and ensure that service levels can be delivered reliably. The service catalog can offer variable costs for different levels of service and can ensure that requested software is procured in accordance with license agreements.

"With these releases, CA has successfully established a unique industry position within the area of service management -- that includes a valuable blend of asset, performance, and service demand information across the full service lifecycle," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president with Enterprise Management Associates. "This critical intersection includes unique support for service provisioning through its service catalog, as well as distinctive capabilities for analyzing service demand for service modeling, and costing services in its Service Metering. As examples, these reflect CA's willingness to make service management as it aligns to business objectives a lot more than just transaction response time -- but rather a more complete support system for services as business deliverables."

In conjunction with partners, CA is delivering a broad set of common IT service definitions to reduce implementation costs and help customers achieve faster time-to-benefit. Designed to "jump start" implementation of a service catalog, these definitions include actionable requests for typical IT activities.

"Many companies would like to reap the benefits of service-based IT management, but lack the internal capabilities to make it happen cost- effectively," said Martin Warner, director with BearingPoint, Ltd., a leading global management and technology consulting firm. "By leveraging CA's Enterprise IT Management vision and BearingPoint's experience, these companies can avoid having to 're-invent the wheel' and more quickly reap the benefits that a well-managed service catalog can offer."

Additional Support for CA Service Management CompuCom

"As a leading IT managed services provider, CompuCom Systems always looks for ways to increase the amount of true, realized value within our client engagements," said Josh Gervey, managing consultant and Enterprise Management practice director at CompuCom. "We are extremely impressed with the tangible, functional gains we have experienced with the CA Service Management solution, especially through CA's common management database (MDB). By centrally storing one version of the data used by multiple applications, CA's MDB alleviates many of the complexities, costs, and time constraints typically associated with the integration projects needed to create a complete solution. This inherent capability translates into faster and more thoroughly integrated implementations which provide enhanced value for our clients."

NCMEC

"In the past, coordinating service-related data from disparate systems had been labor-intensive," said Steve Gelfound, director, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. "With CA's service management solution, we have ready access to not only service desk and knowledge data, but systems and network data - all seamlessly integrated and providing a single version of the truth. With a centralized management database, IT is in a position to further the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's mission by enabling more informed decision making and increased productivity."

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20021111/CALOGO ) About CA

CA , one of the world's largest information technology (IT) management software companies, unifies and simplifies the management of enterprise-wide IT. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., and serves customers in more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com/.

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