Disruptive technologies like cloud computing, mobile and social applications and big data management analytics are the key to transforming business and getting a competitive edge, particularly for managed service providers (MSPs). According to Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies, service providers must meet the needs of a changing IT world in which an increasing number of systems, data and applications exist outside of data centers and firewalls.
New and evolving IT architectures create a number of challenges and demands, and MSPs and cloud providers must rise to the challenge to stay competitive and drive value. Gregoire made his statements in a keynote address to the 5,000 attendees at the inaugural CA World user conference.
"Value is no longer measured by the size of the IT staff, the computing power (MIPs) under management or the square footage of your data centers," said Gregoire. "IT's value today is all about providing the innovation, speed, insight and security the business needs to gain a competitive advantage -- using resources from both inside and outside your company. This creates a huge opportunity for CIOs and other IT leaders to act as a catalyst and enable modern business models and methods -- to not only transform IT, but to transform the business."
Gregoire covered a number of topics in his address, stressing that CA focuses on four technology trends to help customers better deliver and orchestrate IT. DevOps are the first, comprising communication, integration and collaboration among software application developers and IT operations professionals. Having a good relationship between these two teams is important for companies hoping to transform their business model to deliver services faster.
Mobility and mobile management also create a huge opportunity for service providers as businesses demand more mobile applications for anytime secure access to corporate data. And Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a major value-add as service providers deliver solutions by product segment. CA has an ultimate goal of offering a suite of management and security functions that are delivered as a service.
"For most people, SaaS means moving applications to the public cloud," said Gregoire. "But I have a different point of view. To me, SaaS is more of a technology infrastructure and a business model shift. Ultimately, SaaS is a business model that enables us to provide better quality code faster, deliver continuous innovation, meet your needs more rapidly and accurately, and help you deliver better business results in a public cloud, private cloud or behind a customer's firewall."
Finally, the company views data management analytics as a major area of opportunity. Increasingly massive amounts of data create opportunities for service providers to mine and analyze information to find new insight and business value.
"We see a significant opportunity to use big data to make management and security more intelligent and to increase the business value we deliver," he said. "It's an emerging area for us, but one that's receiving a lot of development focus."
Edited by
Rich Steeves
