CA Technologies announced a new version of its IT automation solution that orchestrates IT operational processes across physical, virtual and cloud environments. CA Process Automation 4 is designed with a new user interface, improved integration capabilities, and support for dynamic forms.
By making process flows more robust, easier to author and quicker to deploy, CA claims its updated IT automation toolset has enabled customers to improve service delivery, improve the speed for provisioning infrastructure, and reduce the time to spent on application release tasks. "At the end of the day it boils down to one thing: IT can't keep throwing more and more staff at its challenges," Steve DuBravac, senior product marketing manager for CA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "First, IT leaders need to realize that not only is it unfair to their staff to force them to work on mundane repetitive tasks that have no real career path, but the business is in dire need of analysts who can help them solve their business challenges using technology in clever ways. CA Process Automation 4 addresses this by letting IT automate the mundane quickly."
The new release of CA Process Automation also includes beefed up exception handling capabilities. "With strong exception handling and in process remediation, IT can automate its end to end processes safely and adjust them quickly," DuBravac adds.
CA Process Automation is intended to support IT organizations as they adopt cloud infrastructures. The tool is designed to provide rapid integrations between infrastructure monitoring tools and IT service desks and can automate the diagnostic activities so IT staff has the data they need. The solution also can automate remediation activities.
The solution is also a fit for mainframe shops still struggling with manual procedures, says DuBravac. "There are two ways of considering process automation in the context of the mainframe," he explains. "First is the orchestration of applications running on the mainframe or the mainframe itself. Orchestration in this sense can readily be done while the automation tool is running on a distributed system. The second is having the tool not just orchestrate mainframes but to have it run on the mainframe."
In addition, CA Process Automation and traditional job scheduling solutions have "a natural affinity with each other," DuBravac points out. "In fact, CA Technologies offers Power Packs specifically for our job scheduling customers so that they can optimize the value of their workload automation investments. A Power Pack is a set of pre-engineered processes bundled together that automate set of best practices for a given usage scenario. For example, we offer a Power Pack for those customers who wish to automate the service request processes associated with ad hoc job requests."
CA Process Automation extends to both development shops as well as application delivery, DuBravac says. "We have some customers who have acquired CA Process Automation for the express purpose of automating DevOps processes. Besides automating DevOps, process automation can turn operations teams into developers. Since an end-to-end process looks a great deal like an IT service and an IT service looks a lot like an application, it is worth noting that IT Process Automation is making it possible for IT to easily design, author, deploy, and manage new IT services based solely on the orchestration of existing IT assets. In other words, we support customers being able to create a process in CA Process Automation and tie it to a service catalog or some other trigger mechanism. End users can engage a process whose trigger is tied to a service catalog, portal, or some other UI just like they would an application that is purpose built."
For more information about CA Process Automation, go to http://www.ca.com.