Computer Associates Middle East underlines business case for on-demand computing at GITEX

This is the message Computer Associates Middle East (CA-ME), the leading IT solutions provider, will be driving home at GITEX this year as it unveils 'Sonar' - CA's revolutionary new technology to discover and manage business processes, and a group of new solutions across its Unicenter, eTrust and BrightStor brands.

As the first software company to provide a comprehensive, integrated management strategy for on-demand computing, CA uniquely empowers organizations to achieve unparalleled infrastructure flexibility, attain previously unreachable service levels, and extract maximum business value from their IT resources.

'What we offer through on-demand computing is to make all IT components such as hardware, operating system and business applications to work together efficiently and economically,' said Abdulaziz Al Salloum, managing director of CA-ME. 'I believe CA's Sonar technology is unique in the market place because we are able to help customers get the best out of real on-demand computing regardless of their underlying IT infrastructure.'

The driving force behind on-demand computing is the realization that many organisations' existing IT infrastructure is inefficient, in that capacity far exceeds current and projected needs, and the diverse hardware and software environment is difficult and expensive to manage. Moreover it is sluggish in responding to rapidly changing business demands where launching new services and capabilities is a matter of survival.

Today's problems have developed over time by making a series of IT infrastructure decisions that were intended to meet service levels and make the environment manageable. The resulting tiered approach saw the deployment of separate servers for each function within the enterprise.

As peak demand scaled up, more and more servers were deployed, along with supporting load-balancing systems to distribute the work. Because individual servers are relatively inexpensive, these 'server farms' grew to meet the service levels at peak processing.

The problem with this approach becomes evident when the environment grows to include hundreds or even thousands of servers and storage systems being utilised less and less efficiently. Moving servers between stacks is a time-consuming, error-prone, manual process and as a result is seldom done, so that the average utilization of the servers across the enterprise plummets.

An automated, on-demand computing environment increased efficiency by dynamically allocating resources where they are most needed according to predefined priorities, which can be fine-tuned as required, via the Internet. This not only reduces hardware and software costs but also increases the organisation's responsiveness to changing workloads and new demands for IT resources.

Customers have realized great results in server consolidation projects, including upfront savings in excess of 40 per cent in acquisition costs, 70 per cent reduction in operating costs, vastly improved efficiency and flexibility, and less downtime. This reflects Gartner's prediction (Dataquest, December 2002) that 80 per cent of infrastructure efficiency improvements will be made by IT infrastructure management process optimisation, compared to 20 per cent by new technology.

Sonar technology also brings business relevance to IT management by performing advanced root-cause analysis, assessing the business impact of any infrastructure failure, and pinpointing critical security issues and their causes. Using advanced analytics, Sonar also automatically detects inappropriate network traffic and usage.

Computer Associates Middle East will be demonstrating On-Demand Computing technologies during Gitex Dubai 2003 at Hall 6, L6-3 in Dubai World Trade Center.