By Alan Joch

NOVA, a payment processing company based in Atlanta, has achieved the impressive feat of maintaining 100 percent uptime on its authorization network for 16 years and counting. Because the company, a unit of U.S. Bancorp, serves more than 850,000 merchants, “we need to be up 100 percent of the time, no exceptions,” says Rakesh Gupta, NOVA’s Senior VP for Enterprise IT Management. “Every second that we’re down, we’re not processing transactions—and that means we are losing money.”

To keep NOVA’s uptime streak rolling, Gupta incorporates best practices outlined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) and relies on a variety of management solutions offered by CA to put its Enterprise IT Management strategies into practice. The result: NOVA’s IT team can continuously monitor performance thresholds for every server and network node in their infrastructure. If CPU or memory utilization rates reach critical levels, automatic alerts warn his IT managers of the potential problems. “We measure our success by how quickly we can react to problems before the business even knows there’s an issue,” Gupta says. “Nothing falls through the cracks.”

NOVA isn’t alone. For a number of companies, Enterprise IT Management solutions are making a difference. In fact, these Capability Solutions from CA can provide the building blocks to get you started:

• CA Incident and Problem Management (IPM), which includes service desk capabilities.
• CA Change and Configuration Management (CCM), which assures that the organization carefully plans and tests revisions to the IT infrastructure and applications.CA CMDB (configuration management database), a component of CCM, provides insight into how infrastructure assets interrelate to support services provided to the business.
• CA IT Asset and Financial Management (ITAFM), which helps manage hardware and software assets throughout their lifecycle and helps manage IT expenditures from budgeting through cost allocation.
• CA Dynamic and Virtual Systems Management (DVSM),which helps monitor and optimize both physical and virtualized systems.

The whole of these four Capability Solutions is greater than the sum of its individual parts. In fact, tangible benefits are best seen when all four solutions work together, says Helge Scheil, Senior VP and GM at CA. “Any time you need to analyze what’s happened—or what might happen —to your organization, these technologies can give you a full view of how everything is interrelated,” he explains.

DATA: IDC survey of 12 companies, 2007. Figures show the averages for 100 users in five functional areas: applications management, network management, systems management, database management and workload automation. The net present value represents the benefit received as a result of using the software.

CA Incident and Problem Management
The first step an organization can take when embarking on an IT services management initiative is to implement an Incident and Problem Management (IPM) solution. “Incident and problem management lies at the heart of an organization’s ability to support the business by resolving customer issues and finding their underlying causes in order to prevent recurring problems,” says Mitchell Kenfield, Managing Director at management and technology consultancy BearingPoint. “Many of our clients deal with these key areas first, because this is where business impact is most achievable.”

Solutions that support IPM can lower compliance costs and complexity. “You can show a Sarbanes-Oxley auditor the incident ticket and how you resolved it, which makes everybody’s job much easier,” says David Blais, Director of IT Systems Management at systems integrator Nexio Technologies. “The key concept is having traceability from end-to-end. Having something like CA Unicenter® Service Desk in place is worth its weight in gold, because it saves tons of time and money for an organization. We all know auditors aren’t cheap. The longer they are there looking for this type of information, the more it’s going to cost the organization.”

CA Support Bridge™ Live Automation, an IPM tool, can help cut costs, too. The tool enables online chat sessions that connect end users with service staff to resolve difficulties. It also includes an active component that lets analysts troubleshoot hardware directly by connecting remotely to end users’ machines. Companies that want to reduce in-bound help desk calls can also implement the tool’s automation capability with software wizards that walk end users through established troubleshooting steps. “If you can’t connect to a network printer, you can use this product to resolve the problem and perhaps not have to interact with IT at all,” says Richard Graves, CA’s Senior Product Manager for IPM.

Similarly, CA Unicenter® Service Desk Knowledge Tools, a knowledge-management database that’s integrated with CA Unicenter Service Desk, maintains solutions to common problems that help IT staff and businesspeople quickly find answers to incidents. Another tool, CA Unicenter® Service Desk Dashboard, provides managers with near- real-time summaries of key information about service desk performance and the problems the desk is working on, including where the bulk of service tickets come from. Other reporting capabilities show long-term help desk performance trends.

These solutions are helping CIOs today. “CA’s incident and problem management products have solid, out-of-the-box capabilities, so, for example, a recent client did not require many custom workflows or complex configurations in the tools,” Kenfield of BearingPoint says, describing a recent implementation. “CA has great tie-ins with the rest of the suite, whether it’s the front end with its Unified Service Model or some of its knowledge tools.”

CA Change and Configuration Management
When calls to the service desk result from problems or requests that require revisions to the IT infrastructure, a new solution is necessary. Change and Configuration Management (CCM) provides workflows, based on industry best practices, that help users launch new services, roll out enhancements to existing services, and fix bugs.

CA’s CCM solution comprises three subcategories: Configuration Management, for managing service infrastructure; Software Change Management (SCM), which adds a Software Change Manager; and Client Management Suite (CMS) for managing changes to PCs, laptops and mobile client devices.

With these modules in place, a request to the service desk travels through a consistent, best-practices workflow that is partly based on ITIL guidelines. First, the request generates an incident number that corresponds to a service ticket. Then the ticket passes to a Change Advisory Board for review. Finally, CA Project Portfolio Management collects information about resource availability and scheduling to help the board decide whether the change can be made and whether it can be accomplished within a practical time frame.

CA IT Asset and Financial Management
CA’s IT Asset and Financial Management (ITAFM) solution helps organizations track the total costs of assets and services managed by the IT department. It provides the from both a cost and contractual basis. This solution begins by essentially asking, “What did I pay to get a particular asset into the organization? And what are my ongoing financial obligations?”

From that information, IT organizations can create detailed budgets and processes for capturing costs and calculating charge-backs to each department for the services it uses. Organizations can then forecast the costs of the assets and allocate them to the projects they support. This will help IT and business managers understand the true cost of both actual and contemplated projects and, ultimately, the true cost of providing a business service.

CA Unicenter® Asset Management (UAM) uses software agents to create a comprehensive inventory of IT resources— from high-end servers to mobile devices, as well as the organization’s software applications, including version numbers.

CA Unicenter® Asset Portfolio Management (APM) serves as a repository for ownership information, such as where and when each resource was acquired. It also functions as a repository for aggregating any license agreements, covering usage terms and the cost centers responsible for each asset. APM then hands that granular asset information to Service Accounting, which marries that information with related soft costs. To complement the solution, CA Unicenter® Asset Intelligence creates management portals that provide managers with detailed summaries of relevant asset information.

ITAFM can produce concrete returns on investment based on savings of 10 percent to 30 percent of the overall IT budget. This is possible, in part, due to better management of vendors and contracts, as well as more accurate invoice reconciliation and accounts-payable processes. With these kinds of tools, CIOs can think strategically, then implement tactically, experts say. While many other solutions handle the inventory-discovery portion of the strategy, they can’t manage the business side of asset ownership, because they lack an asset repository to store all the business terms, conditions, contracts and financials. So rather than trying to integrate the many point solutions out there, CIOs are advised to view this area holistically. This means looking for a solution that offers complete support, all the way from inventory-discovery to charge-backs and analysis.

CA Dynamic and Virtual Systems Management
Dynamic and Virtual Systems Management (DVSM) helps organizations discover, monitor and automate the management of heterogeneous, virtual and clustered system environments within their IT infrastructures. DVSM also helps companies understand the relationship between those technology areas and the business by mapping the IT resources directly to the dependent parts of the business.

The DVSM portfolio addresses operational issues so managers can understand and recognize ongoing problems. This solution also helps managers prioritize responses to new IT initiatives, based on which changes are likely to have the greatest positive impact on the business. One solution CIOs can consider is CA Cohesion® Application Configuration Management, which compiles and registers configuration information in the CA CMDB.

A second component, CA Unicenter® Network and Systems Management (NSM), acts as the core product for end to- end systems management. It helps IT departments integrate information across multiple business domains. NSM’s central management console can help CIOs understand which operational issues are at play at any given moment, and develop priorities based on the individual service level requirements of the business process IT is supporting. The console not only shows which systems are performing poorly, but also helps people understand how the poor performance affects specific business processes. In this way, the IT staff can focus on the most important problems first.

For example, assume that a server in one division crashes just as an unrelated printer in another business unit goes down. Without detailed usage information, the CIO might assume that because vital applications rely on the server, getting the server back online would be a higher priority than restoring the printer. But what if the server-based applications are on the outer fringe of the business, but the printer is creating invoices that lead directly to revenue? In that case, the printer should actually take priority. To see this, the CIO would need to first understand how the printer and server each relate to the business service. The CIO would then know where to best focus the organization’s limited resources.

Alan Joch is a business/technology writer based in New England who specializes in enterprise applications, service oriented architectures and business process optimization.

ITIL ® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

These sources provide additional information on Enterprise IT Management solutions that are available today:

• Satyam Improves Customer Response Time by 150 Percent with Incident and Problem Management
• Achieving Business Value and Gaining ROI with CA’s EITM Software for Optimizing IT Infrastructures
• Sallie Mae Uses CA Solutions to Automate ITIL Processes and the Change Management Lifecycle
• CA Unified Service Model
• Reducing IT Complexity: CIOs are embracing new strategies to simplify their environments, Smart Enterprise, Winter 2007