How Can I Deliver Innovative Customer Services

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solution brief | September 2012

How Can I Deliver Innovative Customer Services Across Increasingly Complex, Converged Infrastructure With Less Management Effort And Lower Cost?

Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies does the heavy lifting for your overburdened infrastructure and operations teams by translating huge volumes of monitored data into the actionable insight they need to assure service quality and improve their efficiency.

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Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Executive Summary Challenge IT and engineering organizations are pressured to deliver innovative services to fuel business growth. These services require new, more sophisticated infrastructure technologies to support the surge in the traffic volume, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to work, social media, videos, heavily virtualized data centers, cloud services, wireless services and more. How can already over-burdened staff support these new, more complex infrastructure technologies? Without equivalent innovation in infrastructure management, IT can expect to see service performance decline while the cost of delivering those services to customers increases.

Opportunity A converged approach to infrastructure management will help your IT and engineering teams make sense of massive volumes of performance metrics across all technology domains and focus on what’s business critical so you can take the appropriate action quickly. An application-aware approach to infrastructure management can help your organization meet customers’ and employees’ soaring expectations for anywhere, anytime rich-media services and superior user experience.

Benefits With Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies, overburdened IT teams get the information they need to more proactively and effectively manage infrastructure so you can deliver superior, differentiated services. The solution is designed to provide higher scale, faster, more proactive triage and lower cost than previous approaches to infrastructure management.

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Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Section 1: Challenge

Technology convergence challenges the old ways of managing infrastructure Increasing complexity due to technology convergence heightens demand for IT to play a larger role in generating business results. The escalating importance of delivering superior customer experience as a competitive tool highlights the deficiencies in the current generation of infrastructure management tools. While infrastructure is the backbone for service delivery, it’s often the first point of blame and the least understood. More often than not, infrastructure management investments are technology specific, compounding overall management complexity. Organizations often end up with too many tools and disparate data sources that don’t work well together, further impacting the collaboration efforts across functional and technical domains that these disparate tools require and impeding service delivery. IT often ends up spending more time managing “management” tools than furthering their organization’s business priorities. Aspects and management implications of technology convergence Fault, performance, capacity and network flow are core aspects of infrastructure management. Monitoring and analyzing these aspects in silos make management more complex, impedes triage, slows resolution, makes it difficult for IT organizations to proactively address infrastructure performance, and ultimately raises operational costs. Application performance management is a critical component for the successful delivery of business services to end-users. While application delivery relies on infrastructure, they’ve been managed as separate entities by different teams with little coordination or visibility across domains. This siloed approach to performance management paints an incomplete picture to the detriment of both infrastructure and application performance. Voice, video and data convergence across shared infrastructure is adding complexity and creating the need for unified communications management. All forms of traffic are rapidly increasing, with a virtual explosion of video traffic. Increasingly, users are experiencing and utilizing all three types of services on the same device. Growth in wireless services adds more complexity. IT and engineering need to monitor service quality metrics relative to the service type and in context with the health of the underlying infrastructure to better manage quality of experience. Too much data is a common problem. Most organizations are flooded with data from disparate sources and have no easy means to collect, normalize, analyze and produce actionable insight. As technologies converge, as business demand for unimpeded service performance rise, and as resources become more constrained, the ability to take more decisive action faster becomes a matter of IT professionals’ reputation and survival.

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Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Section 2: Opportunity

Converged infrastructure management CA Infrastructure Management provides best-of-breed capabilities based on the company’s 30-plus years of development experience and recent innovations designed in collaboration with its worldwide customer community. Converged infrastructure management unifies fault, performance, flow, capacity, application response management and more, quickly translating huge volumes of disparate data into actionable insight to improve service quality, predictability and cost-of-ownership.

Figure A. Driving functional domain convergence

Everything in one place Unified management across technology domains with an open integration architecture and broad third-party platform support frees up IT to spend more time proactively managing the environment, rather than managing the process of extracting and gathering data from different tools. A single performance view of monitored data from across technology domains frees up IT from scouring multiple tools to find related information for triaging performance issues and determining root cause. Actionable intelligence for faster problem triage and resolution Huge volumes of raw data are collected from across technology domains and diverse monitoring functions, normalized for analysis and organized to deliver the most relevant information based on users’ roles and requirements. Data and analytics are displayed into a single web-based user interface with guided workflows that efficiently direct IT operations and engineering teams through troubleshooting processes based on best practices for converged infrastructure and applications.

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Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Massive scalability for the largest environments An advanced architecture offers agent-less data collection, state-of-the-art data aggregation technology and dynamic federated analysis, to quickly transform millions of metrics into actionable intelligence. The architecture scales linearly to manage growth for the most complex IT infrastructure. The small hosting equipment footprint and centralized administration features lower both capital and operational expenses. Multi-tenant access control Native multi-tenancy helps assure controlled access to tenant data. This enables managed service provider and enterprise IT staff to separate monitoring environments for each user group/customer, department, location, etc. Administration for all tenants through a single user interface additionally lowers administrative overhead.

Section 3: Benefits

Superior differentiated customer experience Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies is an industrial strength solution enabling enterprises, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to deliver superior quality of service—quickly and economically. IT gains a more complete view of infrastructure health and performance with service-aware infrastructure management that maps the relationships between assets, configurations and events, so the impact of infrastructure issues can be tracked to the affected business services and users. Actionable intelligence helps IT quickly pinpoint sources of service-delivery risks and service-impacting issues across all technology domains to proactively manage the health and performance of critical infrastructure services. Impact analysis directs IT to resolve the highest priority issues first. Improved efficiency and reduced operational costs Superior customer experience, complexity and growth demands put the burden on IT to effectively balance “keep the lights on” tasks with strategic initiatives, all within cost constraints. Our Converged Infrastructure Management solution helps organizations: • Meet scalability and time-to-market demands of the largest, most complex enterprises and service providers while requiring less intensive hosting requirements and administration. • Alleviate resource and skills gap to accelerate triage and remediation with guided workflows, built on engineering best practices. • Rationalize their technology portfolio to reduce management and maintenance costs with an open integration architecture and broad third-party platform support. • Reduce overhead with centralized administration, web services for auto-configuration and integration, policy-based monitoring profiles and device self-certification.

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Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Increased speed and productivity Ease the heavy lifting for IT teams with easy access to graphical views of the critical information they need to deliver superior customer experience. Reduce the need to manually interpret, analyze and correlate raw data ‘overload’ before taking action. You can: • Improve efficiency with converged views of actionable intelligence gleaned from dynamic, federated analysis and sophisticated analytics. • Speed deployment with simple, wizard-guided process for self-certifying new devices; begin monitoring immediately with out-of-the-box metrics, or easily extend to add custom metrics. • Gain a complete view of infrastructure performance by gaining insight into end-user experience with visibility into application response times between infrastructure components. Focus resources on innovation and revenue generation To deliver differentiated services that sustain profitability and growth, enterprise IT and service providers must move beyond “keeping the lights on” tactics and focus on: • Unburdening highly skilled staff for strategic initiatives. • Improving revenue opportunities with flexible deployment and service delivery options. • Advancing cloud initiatives by guiding safe migration of critical applications to virtual hosts.

Section 4:

The CA Technologies advantage Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies is designed for enterprises, MSPs and CSPs to streamline performance, fault and flow management across diverse systems, networks and applications, quickly translating huge volumes of disparate data sources into actionable insight to deliver superior differentiated customer experience—quickly and economically. Our enterprise assurance management tools link end-user experience, transactions, and applications with their underlying systems and network infrastructure. Doing so makes it possible for you to understand the performance, risk, and quality of services across your physical, virtual and cloud environments. Our software provides complete visibility from a service orientation, so you can prioritize actions based on business impact and SLA compliance. Plus, you can be better equipped to adapt to infrastructure growth and change, without impacting service delivery. CA Service Assurance and CA Infrastructure Management solutions are supported by CA Services, the largest consulting group—with 1,400 certified consultants and architects located in 25 countries— focused on CA Technologies in the world. The collective experience of CA Services earned from more than 35 years of work on thousands of successful CA Technologies projects is unmatched. No other organization has seen CA Technologies solutions in action in more environments than CA Services. The group has one objective: to properly assess the current situation and assist in moving forward as quickly and effectively as possible. 7

Converged Infrastructure Management from CA Technologies

Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com

Agility Made Possible: The CA Technologies Advantage CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. CA Technologies is committed to ensuring our customers achieve their desired outcomes and expected business value through the use of our technology. To learn more about our customer success programs, visit ca.com/customer-success. For more information about CA Technologies go to ca.com.

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