CA Brings Consumerlike Experience to Enterprise IT Services

CA Technologies announced CA Service Management, a new solution that brings a consumerlike experience to enterprise IT services and enables users to serve themselves.

The new CA offering brings familiar Google search and Dropbox-like capabilities to business users to enhance the user experience, mobility, and collaboration between IT teams and employees to help attain IT services.

Crystal Miceli, senior director of product marketing for IT Business Management at CA Technologies, said today's business users have a much higher expectation for a modern service experience, shaped by the rapid workplace adoption of consumer applications such as Google, Evernote and Dropbox. Unfortunately, IT organizations that fail to address this continue to be hampered by "shadow IT," dissatisfaction and negative perceptions of IT teams, CA officials said.

The risk of continued disengagement with IT requires a strong response, and CA Service Management addresses this challenge head on, she said.

"Modern business applications need to deliver a level of user experience and excitement which drives greater value for the organization as a whole," said Lokesh Jindal, general manager of IT Business Management at CA, in a statement. "IT organizations must meet these expectations to drive adoption and value from their IT investments."

CA Service Management provides a unified end-user experience for employees to access services, support and assets; customizable mobile support center apps for Apple iOS and Android; and automated self-service, collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

"Sophisticated service management doesn't have to be complex," says Dennis Drogseth, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "CA Technologies demonstrates this with their laser-focus on improving the experience of business consumers as they access IT services as well as their commitment to make mature ITSM processes and technologies easier to adopt for their customers. CA's commitment to making service management easy and accessible is refreshing in an industry still too often lost to functional fragmentation and cobbled architectural complexity."

Miceli said CA Service Management is a "one-stop shop" for enterprise end users to do anything they need to in interacting with IT.

"People have expectations; they want their services to be consumable," she said. "This product allows end users to self-serve, and we find end users want to self-serve. It also enables people to interact with peers rather than IT. They can go get information through Google-style searches and social media-style collaboration."

Robert Young, an analyst with IDC who spent several years as an IT manager, said the CA product has broad appeal and is empowering to users at many levels. For instance, he said Millennials can appreciate the technology. "Millennials are OK with accomplishing some simple IT tasks on their own rather than putting in a service request."

Company officials said thousands of organizations—including large enterprises and many large service providers—rely on CA's IT service management solutions to optimize the service experience for hundreds of thousands of end users. In this release, CA Technologies extends its enterprise-grade solution with advanced high availability for 24/ operation, simplified asset management and other capabilities that increase process maturity while reducing the complexity and cost of IT support operations.

"As business users become increasingly dependent on IT and mobility, anytime/anywhere self-service has become a fundamental requirement for individual productivity and business performance," said Brian McGushin, CA practice leader at Stefanini, a global provider of technology-based business solutions, in a statement. "CA Service Management will enhance the self-service experience we provide to our outsourcing clients and to our internal staff."

IDC's Young said although there are many competing products in the service desk space, the CA solution provides some benefits others do not yet deliver, including mobile optimization and integration of other modules such as an enterprise IT asset management solution and the IT service catalog. Other products offer user interface and design capabilities that provide a consumerlike look and feel, but they lack the deeper integrations, he said.