CA Launches Cloud Service Management Solution

CA Technologies announced the availability of its new CA Cloud Service Management offering, a SaaS-based IT Service Management (ITSM) solution that provides enterprises with a no-code approach to IT services.

CA officials said CA Cloud Service Management's "configure, don't code" approach enables implementation in weeks without new development and maintenance resources or complex upgrades. In many cases, service delivery and resource provisioning can be automated in just a few minutes, the company said. And it provides a consumerlike experience to accelerate adoption and empower end users.

"The explosion of applications and devices deployed in the enterprise has made service delivery a cornerstone of employee and business productivity," said Lokesh Jindal, general manager of IT Business Management at CA, in a statement. "CA has designed a solution that unlocks the full potential of SaaS by focusing on what matters to customers—employee satisfaction, speed of deployment and reduced cost of ownership."

"Solutions like CA Cloud Service Management can deliver on the promise of SaaS ITSM by focusing on efficiently meeting the core needs of user personas rather than a sophisticated technical platform that's difficult to maintain and upgrade," said Robert Young, research manager for Enterprise System Management Software at IDC, in a statement.

According to CA, a recent Gartner study indicated that adopters of cloud-based ITSM technology said in their experience, customization and integration are the most common problems in implementing SaaS-based IT service desk solutions. And infrastructure and operations organizations report that SaaS solutions are not quicker to implement than on-premises solutions and have not led to a reduction in staff supporting the tools.

However, CA Cloud Service Management was built to address those issues by providing an intuitive user interface with modern search and collaboration, a mobile experience for end users to request services from any device, "drag-and-drop" workflows that can be built in minutes, dynamic "in-app" guidance that accelerates initial setup, asset management and discovery, and self-service reporting and dashboards.

"All too often, sound service management adoption suffers with sophisticated solutions that may be stacked with features but are just too difficult to use and costly to maintain," said Dan Timko, president and chief technology officer at Cirrity, an enterprise cloud services provider. "CA Cloud Service Management gave us the capabilities we needed to service our customers while also allowing for an accelerated implementation and time to value."

CA Cloud Service Management further expands CA Technologies Management Cloud offerings—a suite for mobile content, application and device management delivered as a cloud service—launched earlier this year. Customers can get a demo and free trial of CA Cloud Service Management from CA to test the technology.

"Initially we were concerned that CA had under scoped the solution implementation for one of our major customers, but we quickly learned that CA Cloud Service Management's unique approach had eliminated much of the traditional development work associated with service management implementations," said Carey Blunt, global service desk chief architect at Fujitsu, in a statement. "CA Cloud Service Management is functionally-rich and easy-to-implement, with standardized and preconfigured ITMaaS [IT management as a service] capabilities that breathe fresh air into the ITSM market."

In January, CA announced CA Service Management, an on-premises solution that delivers a consumerlike experience to enterprise IT services and enables users to serve themselves.

That CA offering provides 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, 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.

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.