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Dr. Ajei Gopal

CA Outlines Technology Roadmap

Interviewed by Yogesh Gupta Wed, Feb 24, 2010

image We have products and technologies which are core and non-optional for an organization. It puts us in different league than competitors who push ‘nice to have’ or optional offerings. image

Dr. Ajei Gopal Executive Vice President, Products & Technology Group, CA

As worldwide economy returns to normal, how optimistic are you about your product portfolio? Are enterprises ready to invest in CA technologies?

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GOPAL: Business today is fundamentally driven by technology be it financial sector, telcos, manufacturing, supply chain or any vertical. As one of the leading provider of technology in infrastructure business, we see the demand for technologies we deal in, which helps organizations in good times and even the ‘not so good’ times. CA has the right products and essential technologies which are core to an organization. It puts us in a different league than vendors who have ‘nice to have’ or optional technologies.

The demand for ‘nice to have’ deployments has a flip side as the technology landscape has transformed in past one year. What happens to delayed IT projects and how are CIOs reacting to this changed scenario?

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GOPAL: Technology moves very rapidly as there are different set of imperatives on the table than 15 months ago. When financial crisis began, organizations delayed IT deployments according to their priority ladder and budget constraints. Many smart companies foreseeing economy recovery have ramped IT architecture earlier to gain competitive advantage. By nature of fact, time has passed and technology has improved. We see emergence of cloud as a bigger phenomenon today.

Do trends like cloud compel CA to pursue a significant change in their technology roadmap?

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GOPAL: We provide core technologies that allow IT organizations to better support their business around management, security, portfolio management, governance and other tools. There are few areas which are particularly important and relevant to us and management of cloud is one of them. The cloud is making internet, the datacenter of tomorrow. The datacenter is moving outside the four walls of an organization as providers delivering services are part of their virtual organization. CA is investing in areas like virtualization management, Cloud management, network management to name a few. We have number of initiatives and technologies which help CIOs harness the power of cloud and virtualization. We are taking advantage of technology discontinuities like cloud and virtualization to use our products, for CIOs to propel business advantage. At the same time, we are dramatically simplifying and reducing the cost of running complex IT operations at their end.

CA has a strong alliance with VMware. What is your value proposition for virtualized environments of organizations?

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GOPAL: VMware is our valued partner as we support their virtualized solutions. But we work with many vendors in this space. Our biggest benefit is our technology support for heterogonous environment of Linux, UNIX, VMware, Hyper-V and across clouds –single or multiple. VMware offers support capability around Hypervisor and we provide enterprise grade management technology around it. We are not looking at virtualization from purely Hypervisor point of view.  Just embracing virtualization emulates into a tough task of managing thousands of virtual machines which could result in loss of datacenter without specific tools. CA offers a complete solution of visualization solution around management and security to ground up the solution and manage complex virtual environment. This is precisely the solution which organizations are looking on their journey towards virtualization.

CA is a more ‘partner centric’ organization today. What are the opportunities for your channel partners?

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GOPAL: We are working more collaboratively with partners and I believe there are enough opportunities for partners across our portfolio. We are aligned with large application service providers like HCL, Wipro and Infosys who can build robust applications on the underlying layer based on our technology. Large integrators / ISVs can bring all pieces together which involve application and technologies that manage IT infrastructure, security, identity access, performance management at enterprise end.



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