At its CA World 2017 conference this week, CA Technologies moved to tighten the integration between the various elements of its DevOps portfolio acquired over the last year and unveiled CA Digital Experience Insights, an analytics-infused monitoring tool delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
The company also announced an instance of the CA Microservices Gateway that allows the API management platform to be deployed as a Docker container. Earlier this week, CA Technologies launched a beta release of Fastrack.io, a service for monitoring Kubernetes clusters based on machine learning algorithms and embedded in an instance of the open-source Prometheus container monitoring service.
The company is also adding CA Virtual Test Data Manager, a tool that makes it simpler to create copies of large data sets for testing purposes, and CA Service Virtualization Community Edition and CodeSV, a plug-in that enables DevOps teams to invoke service virtualization from within their integrated development environment to mimic external services without having to connect to an actual instance of those services running in a production environment.
Additionally, CA Technologies announced it has integrated CA Veracode security testing software with CA Automic IT automation platform, and announced general availability of BlazeMeter API Test, a SaaS-based API testing tool, and CA Continuous Delivery Director SaaS, a service that integrates the DevOps toolchain.
Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps product and solutions marketing for CA Technologies, says each of these offerings are part of a larger company effort designed to enable organizations to set up their own software factories. Now that more organizations have come to realize their ability to differentiate themselves depends on custom software, many of them want to be able to acquire all the integrated DevOps tools required to achieve that goal from a single vendor, Ravichandran says.
CA Technologies is making a concerted effort to link the need to create a software factory as a prerequisite for driving digital business transformation at scale. To achieve that goal, she says, control over IT operations is continuing to shift to the left as developers become more accountable for the entire application experience. Offerings such as CA Digital Experience Insights make it simpler for developers to holistically manage those end user experiences by infusing predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms coupled with improved data acquisition techniques in a single service, Ravichandran says.
CA Technologies clearly wants to become a DevOps force to be reckoned with. In the last two years it has acquired Blazemeter, Automic, Veracode and Runscope. Prior to that, the company acquired Rally Software, Nolio, Grid Tools and Layer 7 Technologies. From here it’s likely CA Technologies will continue to expand its portfolio by acquiring companies while tightening the integration between the various code bases that make up its DevOps portfolio.
The company’s stated goal is to provide a suite of DevOps tools and services that are too compelling to ignore without forcing IT organizations to consume a product or service they don’t want by maintaining open interfaces across the portfolio. The degree to which CA Technologies can succeed in that effort remains to be seen. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the company has now assembled a formidable DevOps arsenal of products and services.
— Mike Vizard
