I’ve been here at CAworld’15 just getting set up to talk about environments prior to the main event days, and everywhere you look, you see the theme of the company this year: Digital Disruption.
In CA CEO Mike Gregoire’s opening partner reception, he positioned competitiveness for businesses today as primarily driven by software. I think most in the audience would agree with that statement. Then he laid out a three-pronged approach to the market:
• Agile Management: Combining Agile with the acquisition of Rally Systems, Product Portfolio Management and other management tools they are well known for,
• DevOps: Much of the Application Delivery suite we’ve talked about including Release Automation, Service Virtualization and recent Test Data Management acquired with Grid-Tools to resolve dependencies and automate deployment; and
• Security: Here they have 15 of the top 16 banks trusting them with site-level and mobile security, and the addition of API Management (Layer7) also adds to the above two stories for modularly stitching applictions together.
It’s an interesting growth portfolio CA is building, and like their predictions for their customers depending on success in delivering software to meet customer needs, much of the upcoming growth for CA itself would also need to come through their own improvements in enterprise software development.
CA’s CMO Lauren Flaherty continued with a retrospective of the last 2 years, and their adoption of “The Application Economy” as a way to publish more thought leadership and research into the market – and it seems to be generating a lot of activity and interest for them globally.
Lauren’s highly recommended area of this event is an “Agile Transformation Zone” that is both a concept for teaching attendees to bring Agile practices to their organizations as well as the tooling needed for the solution.
Got to stop by and visit the floor area for CA Release Automation they are doing some amazing things not just in leveraging dynamic Skytap environments as part of Release Automation processes for DevOps enablement, but with sales demos and partner certification programs.
Which led me to go see the CAworld’15 Self-Directed Learning lab with more than 60 workstations serving up labs from their learning portal with Skytap like they are running the courseware locally. With more than 180 unique courses delivered in just the first few pre-conference hours – they have already blown out the number they could realistically deliver in previous years with standard classrooms for that hands-on training.
Not many bare seats in these rooms… They can even take these courses from their own hotel room with just a URL to access. Killer stuff to revisit on this topic.
So nice to meet everyone in the partner and product orgs here, as well as some excited customers in the receptions. Given I won’t be able to cover everything going on at the event, I’d expect more thorough reviews from someone else. But I am enjoying the discussion here so far and will report back on how it goes.
