Insights for Better Experiences, Intelligent Automation for DevOps and “Shift-Left” with Security Highlight Innovations from CA for the Modern Software Factory

SANTA CLARA, Calif – At its second annual Built to Change Summit, CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) showcased new and updated innovations across the portfolio that fuel every company’s evolution to a Modern Software Factory.

These solutions integrate powerful advanced analytics and data science with machine-learning, artificial intelligence and automation into the tools and technologies that support the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Across various industries, the use of AI and advanced analytics within the enterprise is certainly top-of-mind for companies looking to optimise their business with the use of this technology. According to a recent Gartner report, “AI and machine learning strategy development/ investment is already in the top five CIO priorities.”[1] Yet, while the benefits of AI at a high level are readily accepted and new use cases continue to emerge, hurdles to fully realising the business benefits of AI still exist. In fact, Gartner states, “CIOs face two key challenges in exploring and adopting AI: the availability of skilled and experienced staff, and the lack of IT and business understanding of AI’s potential,”[2] which highlights for us the need for organisations to consider aspects beyond technology when embarking on a digital transformation journey.

Insights for Better Experiences

Leveraging the vast amounts of data generated to glean actionable insights that drive business impact is an ongoing challenge. Adding to the complexity of the issue is being able to use the data in modern architectures that use APIs and microservices for new and improved services and offerings. To address this challenge, CA is giving customers the ability to derive and apply deep insights for machine learning and artificial intelligence that helps with more accurate planning, as well as predictive modeling, and real-time remediation to operational issue.

“As a leading management consulting and technology services firm that focuses on digital innovation, we understand the critical role that data plays in business transformation,” said Karl Kleinert, vice president of Sales at IntelliNet. “The ability to leverage data taken from various platforms and correlate that data to derive insights that have an impact on our company’s bottom line is an extremely powerful thing.”

New ways CA is helping companies apply key insights include:

• CA Digital Operational Intelligence, a machine learning–driven solution that provides comprehensive insights by automatically ingesting cross-domain data from IT operations tools. Powered by CA Jarvis, the solution uses algorithmic intelligence to quickly identify the problem root cause, measure and improve business service levels, improve cost and resources utilisation, and proactively detect and remedy potential issues.
• CA Project Portfolio Management (CA PPM) 15.4 introduces a strategic planning capability with a roadmapping module for top-down visual planning and collaboration. It gives users the ability to easily view, pivot and sort investment information across the organisation and delivers actionable business intelligence with extensive modeling and forecasting capabilities.

Intelligent Automation for DevOps

The latest update to the CA Automic One Automation Platform empowers the Ops of DevOps through new lifecycle management of automation artifacts, intelligent critical-path management, and support for PostgreSQL. It also supports shift-left automation capabilities for Developers with new automation-as-code functionality, and connects automation silos with new integrations for CA Workload Automation, CA Continuous Delivery Director, and CA Jarvisto deliver powerful analytics capabilities.

 “The CA Automic One Automation engine allows TASC to better orchestrate our development toolchain and plug in the right tools as we need them,” says John Gildenzoph, DevOps engineer at TASC. “Whether we need to deploy software or new instances, our automation engine gives us the flexibility to deliver new services at scale. With the CA Automation platform, we are now a more nimble and agile organisation and instead of being impeded by arduous processes, we can focus on what is important – driving business value for the company.”

Secure Development from the Start 

The latest addition to the CA Security portfolio, CA Veracode SourceClear is a SaaS-based software composition analysis tool which relies on a unique vulnerability database that goes beyond the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and vulnerable methods technology to increase the actionability of static composition analysis (SCA) results. Unique to CA, the combination of CA Veracode and CA Veracode SourceClear offerings enable organisations to use open source libraries to accelerate software development without adding unmanaged risk to support the DevSecOps movement.

“Being able to integrate application scanning in our DevOps practices means delivering new value-added services to customers quickly, with the reassurance of security and integrity in all apps and services,” said Scot Bellamy, manager and senior security architect at Cardinal Health. “We’re shifting left and cutting down cycle times by integrating security into our development practices.”

“We’re seeing the benefits of advanced analytics, machine-learning and artificial intelligence today and for the future,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer at CA Technologies. “CA is helping every modern software factory by integrating and incorporating these capabilities with big data, automation and security to help customers realise even greater value from their technology investments.”

In addition to these new and updated solutions and capabilities, CA also today announced new innovations for mainframe environments.

^1,2 Gartner, Predicts 2018: Artificial Intelligence, November, 13, 2017, Whit Andrews, Moutusi Sau, Chirag Dekate, Anthony Mullen, Kenneth F. Brant, Magnus Revang, Daryl C. Plummer

Additional Resources

Blog: It’s All About the Data by Ayman Sayed