Embrace disruptive technologies to drive business: CA Tech

By Gabey Goh April 24, 2013

Value of IT is in driving business innovation and competitive advantage
Four key technology trends: DevOps, mobility, SaaS and big data analytics management

Embrace disruptive technologies to drive business: CA Tech CHANGE is going to happen -- are you going to drive it or be driven by it?

That was the question posed by Mike Gregoire (pic), CA Technologies chief executive officer, during his inaugural keynote address to the 5,000 IT professionals and customers present at CA World 2013, in Las Vegas.

Gregoire urged CIOs (chief information officers) to embrace disruptive technologies such as the cloud, mobile, social and big data management analytics, to transform business and drive competitive advantage.

“Now is the most important time to embrace these changes. The role of the CIO is going to change, whether you like it or not,” he said.

According to Gregoire, IT’s value today is all about providing the innovation, speed, insight and security the business needs to gain a competitive advantage – using resources from both inside and outside the company.

“This creates a huge opportunity for CIOs and other IT leaders to act as a catalyst and enable modern business models and methods – to not only transform IT, but to transform the business,” he added.

During his keynote address, Gregoire also outlined four technology trends that will enable IT with a greater impact on business: DevOps, mobility, software as a service (SaaS) and big data analytics management.

Gregoire said the communication, integration and collaboration between software application developers and IT operations professionals – commonly called DevOps – is vital if companies wish to transform their business models in order to deliver services to the market faster.

“The demand for applications today appears to be nearly insatiable. I ran across a reference recently that says it all – calling this new world ‘The Planet of the Apps’,” he said.

“The benefits of DevOps are not trivial. We believe our solutions can help you achieve as much as a 30% to 50% reduction in time to market; an 80% to 100% improvement in quality; and a 20% to 30% reduction in infrastructure costs,” he added.

The explosion of mobile devices is another big challenge for IT organizations. While business is demanding more mobile applications to gain anytime access to corporate data, when it comes to the security of data, what users don’t know, Gregoire said, can hurt them.

While discrete products to manage devices are available today, they do not help manage the content and applications being deployed.

“True enterprise mobility management requires a comprehensive approach that extends beyond device management to include mobile application, content and services management,” said Gregoire.

CA Technologies will also invest in SaaS delivery by product segment, with the ultimate goal of providing a suite of management and security functions delivered as a service.

Gregoire noted that for most people, SaaS means moving applications to the public cloud. However, he called it a “very shallow view.”

“To me, SaaS is more of a technology infrastructure and a business model shift. Ultimately, SaaS is a business model that enables us to provide better quality code faster, deliver continuous innovation, meet your needs more rapidly and accurately, and help you deliver better business results in a public cloud, private cloud or behind a customer’s firewall.”

In addition, massive amounts of data are not helpful without a means to mine and analyze the information for insight and business value, he said.

“The first challenge is to manage and secure all this data. The bigger the data, the bigger the challenge for management and security, and this is our sweet spot,” said Gregoire.

“We see a significant opportunity to use big data to make management and security more intelligent and to increase the business value we deliver. It’s an emerging area for us, but one that’s receiving a lot of development focus.”

Gregoire added the market will see more emphasis from CA Technologies on organic innovation, with a goal of differentiating everything the company does to deliver even more value to customers – from innovation on the mainframe to distributed computing and cloud management.

Gabey Goh reports from CA World 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the invitation of CA Technologies. See also Acquisitions and expanded portfolios unveiled at CA World