CA Technologies addresses critical DevOps challenges

“Winning in today’s world of rapid agile development and complex hybrid infrastructures requires IT organizations to have automated application delivery processes and tools to deliver innovation to customers with perfection, and faster than the competition,” said Shridhar Mittal, general manager, Application Delivery, CA Technologies. “Building on our expertise in Service Virtualization—through both organic development and a targeted acquisition—we are driving efficiencies, cost savings and faster release cycles, and equally important, we are helping our customers achieve a truly optimized approach to DevOps.”

With the combined application delivery solution, customers can simplify and streamline application releases, develop and test applications rapidly, move applications into production automatically with higher quality, and better ensure continuous application delivery across the software development lifecycle for improved business and operational agility.

“We are driven to constantly innovate and deliver new applications to market, and that has aligned us closely with the DevOps direction of the CA LISA product suite,” said Laura Miller, senior vice president, Financial Services Application Development, First Data Corporation. “When we virtualize away constraints and automate manual tasks in the software lifecycle, collaboration between Development, QA and Operations teams happens at a new level. We can reliably expect continuous improvement in time-to-market as well as better reliability of the new services our customers demand.”

Nolio Acquisition
Nolio is a recognized leader in continuous application delivery with a strong and growing international base of large enterprise and service provider customers.

Nolio’s solutions help customers:
• Improve business and operational agility by dramatically cutting release times;
• Simplify, standardize and execute application releases with better precision;
• Automate application rollbacks for faster recovery and service continuity; and
• Enable fast, agile and scalable release automation for cloud and traditional applications.

According to a recent 451 Research report, “Nolio is growing both its service-provider and enterprise customers, which bodes well for its future and for the release-automation and devops market. Nolio’s growth also reinforces the enterprise evolution of devops – the confluence of application development and deployment via IT operations – and how more enterprise and service-provider customers are implementing automation, continuous deployment and devops more broadly after already having successfully achieved divisional, test and proof-of-concept deployments.”

CA LISA Application Delivery Suite
At CA World 2013, CA Technologies unveiled its expanded CA LISA Application Delivery suite, which addresses the most critical DevOps challenges and helps a high velocity application delivery organization to deliver faster to market, with superior quality and reduced costs. The suite includes:
CA LISA Service Virtualization: Reduces or eliminates constraints—or roadblocks—such as limited lab and system availability, and incomplete software and test data that prevent on-time application delivery—by modeling dependent systems and services. The latest version now offers mainframe capabilities, international support, and additional protocols and data capabilities.

This solution helps customers:
• Improve quality by shifting error identification earlier in the development cycle;
• Speed time-to-market for updated or new services;
• Lower infrastructure and pay-per-use service costs;
• Reduce demand and contention for physical hardware and labs; and
• Enable parallel development in a 24/7 available virtual environment.

CA LISA Release Automation: With the Nolio acquisition comes this new offering that dramatically improves the ability to move application software efficiently and reliably through the development process and into production across vastly different IT environments spanning physical, virtual and cloud.
With CA LISA Release Automation, customers can:
• Automate the complex processes and changes required to move code between development, test and production;
• Improve application quality and reliability by standardizing release processes;
• Increase the velocity of application release cycles;
• Reduce platform dependency easing migration and deployment;
• Assure successful deployment and roll-back capability; and
• Simplify production deployment and capacity planning.

"Thomson Reuters relies on innovative technology platforms to deliver critical news, information and solutions to our professional customers around the world. CA LISA Release Automation will assist our technologists and developers to automate the deployment of some of our key applications, increasing the speed and efficiency with which we bring new products and offerings to market," said Charlie Richardson, Head of Development Effectiveness, Thomson Reuters.

CA LISA Pathfinder: Allows IT organizations to better model real-world environments for development and test using intelligence from both development and production.
This solution helps customers to:
• Eliminate repetitive testing and validation tasks to allow resources to focus on improving value-added functionality;
• Capture life-like production-level traffic and performance metrics in pre-production;
• Allow users to rapidly create and maintain automated Continuous Integration testing suites;
• Increase regression coverage with robust validation of business scenarios;
• Reduce the time and cost of defect resolution with automated defect capture and root-cause issue reporting; and
• Automate application architecture model discovery and mapping.

CA LISA DevCloud Manager: Helps ensure the environments and infrastructure used in development, test and production are ready for applications, across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure.
With CA LISA DevCloud Manager, customers can:
• Reduce manual setup, maintenance and tear-down time, as well as excess infrastructure costs for complete environments through automation;
• Eliminate resource conflicts between multiple development and test teams with near-instantaneous availability of pre-configured lab environments;
• Allow IT to set centralized standards in provisioning application development environments, while offering flexibility to empower teams to define specific project configurations and data; and
• Optimize the consumption of pre-production computing resources in private or public cloud environments.