Islandia New York-based CA Technologies Inc. has updated its Service Operations Insight to version 3.0, adding five new main features to the software.
David Hayward, director of marketing for CA Technologies, said “service operations insight addresses the management of both the traditional data centre environment as well as the private, public or hybrid cloud.”
He said “(SOI) puts a view of all those technologies that are already being managed by other products in the context of the business service that’s being delivered to the end user,” allowing businesses to visually monitor the quality and availability of those services. It “is a product that integrates real-time information from tools that actually manage different technology silos,” Hayward said.
The updates, Hayward said, address automation and mobility features that previously weren’t available in SOI.
Two of the more interesting additions are dynamic service modeling and service driven automation.
Dynamic service modeling, one of SOI’s newest features, gives IT manages “more flexibile and more automated ways to build end views right across their IT environment, comprised as a service and as those things dynamically change, it can recognize the relationship and update the model.” He said this makes SOI more flexible than traditional BSM (business service management) tools, because “that’s really meant to dynamically discover and maintain real time views of services and then help you automatically pinpoint, across all technology silos, what is the source of a degradation or outage.”
Service driven automation is precisely what it sounds. Hayward said “automated actions can actually kick off workload for provisioning of data centre resources, they can kick off service desk tickets, they could kick off e-mails that escalate the issue,” among other actions.
SOI has also had a mobile pane added that allows IT managers and other stakeholders to dive into the interface without having to be in front of a dialed-in PC.
SOI isn’t CA’s first or only cloud offering. Jay Fry, vice-president of marketing for cloud computing at CA Technologies said the “amount of choice out there [with cloud offerings] are overwhelming.” CA’s hope, according to Fry, is to provide a suite of options for businesses to better view their assets from a top-down view.
Hayward said that SOI “puts a view of all those technologies that are already being managed by other products in the context of the business service that’s being delivered to the end user.” “It’s meant to leverage the actual monitoring of information from tools that customers already have in place whether they’re CA products or whether they’re third party,” he said.
– with files from Joab Jackson