CA Technologies delivers next wave of DevOps innovation

New, industry-first, seamless integration of service virtualisation with API management allows customers to deliver more powerful applications quickly and more effectively. As businesses seek to use APIs to build applications and open new revenue opportunities, CA has extended Agile Parallel Development in the enterprise to power innovation and growth for customers.

Melinda Ballou, program director, Application Life-Cycle Management and Executive Strategies at IDC, said: “APIs are becoming the primary customer interface for technology-driven products and services on mobile and other environments and a key channel for driving revenue and brand engagement. Yet organisations lag at being able to test and improve API quality. By integrating CA Service Virtualisation and automated testing with API management capabilities, CA is helping to enable parallel development efforts and improve application quality. We believe CA made the right decision to integrate their service virtualisation and test with API management solutions. Offering these kinds of combined capabilities is differentiating and can enable rapid application delivery.”

The CA DevOps portfolio on display at CA World includes solutions across all platforms, from mobile to mainframe. Using CA DevOps solutions, customers have reported significant improvements in productivity (up to 60 percent), development speed (between 25 and 50 percent) and deployment (with up to 15 times reduction in manual effort).

Dana Edwards, managing director and chief technology officer at MUFG Union Bank, said: “As a full-service bank with offices and data centers across the United States, we have focused on becoming the world’s finest technology organisation, so the fast delivery of new products and services is a priority. It’s one thing to make the release date, but if we also release a superior product, under budget, with minimum defects and stress tested for maximum loads using the benefits of simulation, that’s even better. As a result of CA Service Virtualisation, we have reduced the costs for testing cycles by 65-85 percent, application development time is reduced, downtime due to refreshing test environments is now one hour vs. 10 hours, and time to set up development environments has been cut from 42 days to just three days.”

Mandi Haas, director, Release Management and HealthPAS Administrator of Molina Healthcare, said: “We faced vast challenges of processing complex claims through numerous integrated software components required for a Medicaid Management Information System. With CA Release Automation, we were able to reduce the cost of human error by 90 percent, speed up application deployment time by more than 75 percent, and ultimately increase customer service.”

Ramesh Ganapathy, head of DevOps, North America at Tech Mahindra said: “CA’s easy-to-use DevOps solutions provide innovative methods for tackling various technology requirements that ultimately helped us reduce costs in development, test and quality assurance areas. With CA Service Virtualisation and CA Release Automation, we were able to improve our service delivery cycle time by 20-22 percent, reduce bugs by approximately 30-35 percent in production and 25-30 percent in the overall development cycle time. As a result, our application release time has been shortened from days to minutes.”

Additional enhancements to the CA DevOps solutions announced today include: new CA Mobile App Analytics to extend application performance management across all platforms and important new CA Release Automation features that further accelerate multi-tiered application deployments.

Raj Rao, senior vice president and general manager, Application Delivery at CA Technologies, said: “CA is providing the software backbone needed to transform enterprises into high-quality application factories. Our new and enhanced DevOps solutions include industry-first capabilities that will accelerate development and deployment cycles and drive higher performance to meet growing end-user demands. Applications are the face of business, and we are helping our customers gain new competitive advantage in a world powered by applications.”

The following solutions are part of the broad portfolio of DevOps capability on display at CA World ’14.
Agile Parallel Development – New capability unleashes development velocity
Newly released connectivity between CA Service Virtualization 8.0 and CA’s industry-leading API Management brings APIs into the DevOps process, and delivers improved time-to-market and quality for customers. CA Service Virtualization 8.0 improves the speed of error and defect detection and resolution, and provides more powerful and automated simulated test environments.

Continuous Delivery – Connects with any open-source DevOps tool to offer high-speed, high-quality release automation
With CA Release Automation 5.5, CA further strengthens customers’ ability to drive the continuous delivery of multi-tiered application deployments. New customer integrations can now be delivered in minutes – instead of days, with automated deployment across the application lifecycle. And, the industry’s most comprehensive third party, open-source integration library protects customers’ prior IT investments.

Chandranshu Singh, senior analyst at Ovum commented on CA’s DevOps offerings in a September 2014, OVUM SWOT Assessment report: “The application release process is still being run manually in many organisations; not only is it resource intensive and inefficient but also error prone. The business impact of faulty releases is two-fold: on the one hand, there is revenue loss or penalties are imposed by the client; and on the other hand, there is the loss of reputation. Release automation tools help organisations avoid production issues caused by erroneous releases.

“CA Service Virtualisation and CA Release Automation are tightly integrated and make for a compelling offering for organisations looking to speed up their application delivery. Furthermore, the two products are among the market-leading tools in their respective categories. CA Technologies has managed to establish itself in a fast-growing and competitive market segment and is well placed to capitalise on its position.”

Agile Operations – Deeper application performance analytics to enable a higher quality user-experience
New CA Mobile App Analytics (CA MAA) extends CA’s performance management across all enterprise applications and supporting infrastructure, from mobile to mainframe. Tighter business KPI alignment allows customers to identify and remedy issues faster, and track application performance against key business measures.

Global Service Delivery Drives Successful DevOps Transformation
A recent study showed that more than half of organisations require consulting support to help them achieve a successful DevOps transformation.
To meet this need, CA offers an expanding DevOps practice with a strong network of partners to offer training, assessment and other key services to promote successful DevOps adoption. A growing network of partners will support customers anywhere in the DevOps methodology adoption cycle.

Rohit Antao, principal and enterprise DevOps leader at PwC, said: "Today's digital reality is placing tremendous pressure on IT leaders to maintain an unwavering focus on speed to market, while not losing sight of service experience and quality. By combining PwC's deep industry knowledge and IT transformation experience with CA's DevOps solutions, we are in a great position to help clients that have found themselves at this cross section. Together, we will be able to address the most pressing IT delivery issues enterprises are faced with today."

Vilas Patil, practice leader, DevOps Services at Cognizant, said: “DevOps is becoming a vital platform of our clients’ continuous delivery strategies. That is why Cognizant and CA are expanding our partnership to help companies drive innovation and business value with DevOps. By combining Cognizant’s DevOps experience and the ca Devcenter technologies, we can help companies automate complex release deployments, reduce errors and speed up application delivery from days to minutes.”