CA integrates Wily tools to deal with service slips

CA has announced integrated performance management and service desk tools at its CA World user event

At its CA World user show in Las Vegas this week, enterprise software vendor CA launched an integrated IT performance and service management suite, designed to help firms identify application performance problems and meet service levels.

Service Quality Management is based on a mix of Unicenter tools and products from application performance specialist Wily Technology, which CA acquired last year. The integrated offering combines CA Service Desk, CA Service Level Management, Wily Introscope and Wily Customer Experience Manager.

Mike Malloy, vice-president of marketing and product development at CA Wily Technology, said the system will help IT teams proactively detect problems, automate the process of root-cause analysis and communicate service-level trends to other business departments.

Wily Introscope monitors performance at the database level, while Customer Experience Manager watches the transactions taking place at the application level. If a problem is detected, the Customer Experience Manager tool triggers an incident report and sends that to the service desk team to assess and fix the problem, while the Service Level Management tool records all the activity and can assess whether the incident has affected the overall service level agreement.

“A problem can be detected and remedied without a customer call or the frontline service organisation needing to get involved,” Malloy said. “The IT team has fixed the issue proactively and can give very specific information about the ongoing business process.”

The software required to carry out the integration will be completed and made available free to customers this summer, according to Malloy. “The code is appended to the individual products to allow data to be captured and sent out to the other products,” he added. “A customer might have one, two or three of the products and then buy the extra ones to take advantage of the capability.”

A chargeback module is also on the cards for the integrated offering. “A number of organisations are asking for the ability to charge [for IT services],” Malloy said. “We have a charge-back tool already in the Unicenter line. Integration with that is definitely in line for the future.”

Mike Henning, technology architect at US wireless provider Alltel and a CA customer, said his interest in the integrated Service Quality Management suite would rest on the ease of migrating from other products.

“We’ve got a very heavy implementation of HP OpenView including 185,000 templates, and we’ve built our own integration around that, and we’ve also got strong integration with BMC Remedy,” Henning said. “We’re looking at business service management going forwards and we’re not opposed to looking at other solutions, but we’d need to be able to change over as lightly as possible.”