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IT can never be easy, but easi-er

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Abhigna
New Update

MUMBAI, INDIA: The lights should not be out. That is - a somewhat regressive, redundant but all the same - a real mandate that most CIOs are caught up with. Abhilash P from CA Technologies pinned the spotlight well when asked about how IT departments' parking tickets change with cloud contracts. He zoomed in how business's expectations of IT compare to contractual behavior of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and that is where visibility and control in seriously complex environments (irrespective of it being a private cloud, a public or a hybrid one) get critical. It is important that any investments that CIOs are making today stay future-proof.

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His comrade Kevin Lambert, Advisor, BU Strategy for Nimsoft Worldwide, CA Technologies, takes the argument further as he puts his Nimsoft-lineage to a fascinating advantage. For one, he can talk of SLA toothpicks, provisioning napkins, cloud-complexity tissues and freshening-mints at a restaurant, all in the same breath. Inhale this quick interview.

How has the journey been since the CA-Nimsoft acquisition?

The context of managing IT has been influenced a lot by all sorts of new forces from virtualization, cloud, Big Data, delivery of applications to increase in mobility etc. At Nimsoft, we had seen the opportunities that MSP (Managed Service Provider) and SMB side of the market presented and now full integration together with CA allows us to resonate to these needs better and faster as well as to mid-market and CSP segment.

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Cloud is surely a zeitgeist to reckon with. But while you are trying to address all the problems that surround or follow a cloud-switch-on, isn't that something that some cloud providers are also trying to bundle with their core offerings? Does that not make more sense?

What is lacking on visibility is a complex problem. IT department is often absorbed in keeping the lights on, even when not needed. That reduces cloud's efficiency too. What we bring to the table - and that is interesting since most clouds are hybrid - is the part of IT challenge to be able to monitor environments in a data centre and environments in a Cloud with a single interface. That was Nimsoft's unique strength early on. ‘IT management under one head' is a great advantage. Today's business is very dynamic requiring agile behavior and apt hardware architecture. CA offers a holistic approach to companies at business service parts. This is not just about the virtualization problem but about creating a business-service vision across the spectrum. It is about delivering the services to market, managing the complexity and helping companies as well as CSPs to create a consistent experience.

How significant is provisioning and sprawl part of the virtualization challenge?

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We are in a unique situation to analyse and understand what is happening with virtualized environments. CA provides both customers and CSPs to take proactive decisions on performance, capacity and service delivery aspects.

If the possibility of a remote control for IT departments is so strong and plausible, where does it leave all that SLA legwork during Cloud contracts?

Now the lines of responsibility are blurred when it comes to IT departments. May be, the team is not responsible, but it is still accountable. The department can definitely look at someone else and hold CSPs on for SLAs but that doesn't help when the CIO has to face a CMO or a CEO. A CIO is still liable there. That's the crux of current IT challenges and that's where the need for future-proof solutions and flexibility pops up.

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Is the management and visibility piece an exciting problem then? Also, should CIOs feel elbowed out when it comes to their own roles in present times?

It is not what we do; it is how we do it that makes CA stand out. Implementation time is still a struggle at many enterprises. If someone is looking at an easy or fast tool without the baggage of complexity and implementation time, that's where we want to be. Nimsoft coming together with CA allows the best of both worlds, in a sense and that too with the ease and pace needed. We can never make IT itself simple. It is changing so much every day that it can never be easy. But we can make it easier. That too, without all the ‘lights-on' issues. We will try to make CIOs more and more relevant.

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Is CA clear when it comes to vendor-neutrality?

Yes, it doesn't matter if it is IBM or VMware. One of the biggest factors in such decisions being future-proof is around vendors. The way technology is being consumed today shows that vendor-agnostic is the way ahead. If you ask any of CIOs, everyone in some way wants to have a vendor-neutral answer and they want tools in their armory that way.

Even as initiatives like CloudStack or OpenStack gather steam; have standards really progressed adequately so as to allow all that management and visibility and more?

That is an absolute issue and challenge because enterprise IT teams still do not have enough people and budgets and there is no time to think of this challenge. That brings us to CSPs and MSPs. Some have the best skills, resources, knowledge and wherewithal to tackle this. Companies can leverage product and libraries of APIs and extend them into their offerings.