CA World '17: If your business doesn't have a 'Modern Software Factory,' will it survive?

Disrupt yourself, or be disrupted. Digitally transform your business, or go out of business. Embrace AI and machine learning, or have someone else's machine learn how to put you out of business.

Use artificial intelligence, APIs, apps and more, and make sure your apps, internal and external processes, information sharing, customer and partner interaction and everything else, or wonder why customers are leaving you for your more advanced competitors, and your best employees do the same, too.

It's 2017, and there are still plenty of companies who either haven't properly made the leap into the future, or are using technologies a few years old that just can't cope with the ever increasing demands of the modern era, and its incessant acceleration into all things digital.

{loadposition alex08}It's just a fact of life, and if you're not part of the solution to bring your business up to speed, you're part of the problem that stops your business from being best of breed, and is part of the problem seeing your business bleed.

You can only bleed for so long until you're dead, and while these are my words and not CA Technologies', it's clear that the time is now to take action, lest you lose traction. Don't let distraction impede digital satisfaction.

Now, CA Technologies is aimed at larger businesses, corporate and enterprise customers, government entities and organisations of a similar calibre, rather than small businesses, but with big business in no way too big to fail, such organisations cannot survive on momentum alone, for if you fail to plan for the future, then you've obviously planned to fail and your customers should start abandoning you now.

No organisation of any size wants that, of course, so it should come as no surprise that CA Technologies has a range of new product releases and enhancements "helping companies of all sizes increase the quality and velocity of application development and delivery, coupled with automation, agile development, machine learning and more."

It is the taking of digital transformation and the journey into creating your own "Modern Software Factory" so your business doesn't just survive, but successfully reaches the next level.

Mike Gregoire, CEO of CA Technologies, whose Day 1 keynote can be seen here (and the Day 2 keynotes also), said: "The Modern Software Factory frames how organisations transform themselves by leveraging agile, automation, insights and security. CA brings the experience and solutions to help you chart your own path, and your factory ensures that your company is built to change and can adapt in an accelerating, digital world.”

The company says its expanded portfolio "integrates advanced analytics and machine learning for companies of all sizes to apply intelligence to the technology and tools that support faster, quality software development and delivery."

John Fiedler, senior VP of Digital at Fox News said: "As the media landscape continues to shift dramatically, we are excited to bring our new digital strategy to life. In a partnership with CA Technologies, we are adding new tools for agility, automation, and continuous testing to our development workflows.

"We are modernising how news is delivered by completely reimagining our digital products and replacing our backend systems. All of these initiatives will ultimately lead us to be faster and more efficient in delivering breaking and real-time news across all digital platforms."

14 videos comprising of executive interviews, Q&A sessions, show floor tour and more can be seen at my previous CA World '17 article here. 

So, with all that has been written above, what are some of the specifics that CA Technologies is offering relevant organisations in 2017, 2018 and beyond?

These include:

Build with business agility using modern architectures

CA showcased its "new, award-winning CA Microgateway. It modernises monolithic application architectures with a lightweight, modular services approach to leverage existing systems and build new applications quickly and securely.

"Companies can deploy and manage microservices in minutes across multiple architectures, with ready-to-use security, service discovery at scale and intelligent traffic management to support mobile apps and Internet of Things (IoT) systems."

Leverage intelligent automation for faster, more reliable software

CA says its "Automic One Automation Platform is driven by data analytics orchestrated across a complex, diverse landscape of applications, platforms and technologies to automate for efficiency and create room for innovation.

"Modern software factories know how to stay ahead of the pack, and intelligent automation helps them support and scale DevOps with simplified processes and less scripting for Ops team, and zero-touch self-service capabilities for development teams."

Correlate business data for insights to improve every customer experience

CA tells us "there is inherent value in business and operational data from existing systems. Correlating data for insights across infrastructure operations, applications and users, the new CA Digital Experience Insights is a SaaS-based digital experience monitoring and analytics solution.

"It provides companies a full picture of their customers’ experience across digital platforms with advanced analytics resulting in a more than 50-70 per cent improvement[1] in customers’ digital experience."

Integrate security from the start to reduce risk and exposure

CA says its "Veracode Greenlight, now available as a free trial, empowers developers to develop with velocity and quality. It allows developers to produce vulnerability-free code with instant feedback on security defects, right in their Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).

"The ability to scan and correct as they code gives them the ability to speed up the process of software development and delivery without compromising security, opening up the world of DevSecOps."

Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies said: "Every business can be a modern software factory and achieve better business outcomes faster with the right intelligence.

“Today our portfolio is comprised of the tools and technologies that inject analytics and machine learning into our customers’ existing technology investments to compete and win in today’s fast-moving marketplace.”

So, what is more information on CA Technologies' "expanded portfolio to support DevSecOps with velocity and scale?"

The company says its expanded portfolio "allows companies to integrate security into the earliest stages of development and assure security in deployment – an emerging practice known as DevSecOps."

CA proudly boasts it is "uniquely positioned to deliver industry leading capabilities" to its customers with "new capabilities in the CA Automic, CA Veracode, and Continuous Delivery portfolios."

The company quotes Gartner stating that “The goal of DevSecOps is to improve the overall security posture by designing a set of integrated controls to deliver DevSecOps without undermining the agility and collaborative aspects of the DevOps philosophy.

"Simply layering standard security tools and processes onto the DevOps cycle won't work. Security checks, controls and testing need to be applied as automatically and transparently as feasible throughout the development, delivery and operation of applications.”

Improving speed without sacrificing security

Supporting the continuous delivery value stream, CA says its "Continuous Delivery Director SaaS integrates the DevOps toolchain for complete visibility into the planning and troubleshooting of development projects, with the ability to assess pipeline progress and performance."

Indeed, we're told that "it gives DevOps teams a way to eliminate a manual and burdensome process in release planning and management.

"To bring security to the process, integration with CA Veracode makes application security testing a key component of the development process by initiating checks throughout the development pipeline.

"And additional integration with CA Automic Application Release Automation extends faster deployment capabilities with an automated, agile back end that delivers more reliable releases of code."

In addition comes the statement that "every modern software factory strives to build better apps faster, but requires the right tools and processes across all phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). With a DevSecOps approach, integrating tools and processes that encourage better collaboration across development, operations and security teams makes security a natural part of development and operations."

Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies returns to state: "Companies that embrace DevSecOps deliver better and more-secure software because of the focus on collaboration and alignment across disciplines.

“In today’s security environment, it is critically important for security to be integrated seamlessly throughout the whole software development lifecycle. We are pleased to be able to provide CA customers with new tools that do just that across our CA Automic, CA Veracode, and Continuous Delivery portfolios.”

And, what of "digital trust with AI powered software and intelligent automation?"

CA says its "new mainframe innovations help customers speed time to resolution by 5x, reduce insider threats and cut operational expenses by 25%."

The details are the announcement of "new, modern mainframe solutions that help organisations gain insights to predict and remediate performance issues automatically, protect customer privacy, drive agility and decrease costs."

With CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, CA Trusted Access Manager for Z and CA Dynamic Capacity Intelligence, CA says "companies can leverage analytics and machine-learning to increase digital trust with their customers."

Ashok Reddy, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies said: "It’s critical to lay the foundation of digital trust with 80 per cent of the world’s corporate data residing on mainframes that run 68 per cent of the world’s production workloads.

“Digital trust is essential to enable enterprises to verify people, protect data and assure app integrity and performance. Through AI and machine-learning powered intelligent automation, CA’s new mainframe solutions enable increased insights across broader sets of data. This will help businesses manage retiring skills through intelligent automation, while increasing security, scalability and flexibility on their current platforms, including IBM Z, in a secure and trusted environment.”

And what of "earlier prevention and faster resolution with machine-learning?"

Here we're told that "CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence uses machine-learning and automation to capture patterns, triggering dynamic and reliable remediation. The solution builds on anomaly detection so users can predict issues sooner and automate resolution before service level agreements (SLAs) are impacted.

"Available with an IBM System Management Facilities (SMF) Adapter, customers can now absorb additional data directly from the IBM Z environment to gather intelligence from mainframe data outside of CA products. This is key because when it comes to machine learning and intelligence, the wider the set of data, the more accurate the predictions."

Seth Miller, director, Enterprise Server Resource Planning and Automation, AIG said: “Supporting a variety of new business initiatives, our IT environment continues to grow more complex.

“We are looking to incorporate machine-learning and intelligence to simplify and improve our IT operations to further reduce costs while providing an outstanding customer experience.”

And what of "reinforcing trust in the next era of cyber threats?"

Here, CA states that: "Almost two billion data records around the world were lost or stolen by cyberattacks in the first half of 2017, according to the latest findings by digital security provider Gemalto1, and of the 65 companies evaluated, the breach cost shareholders over $52.40 billion in total."

To help manage risk and maintain customer trust, CA says it is "boosting enterprise security with CA Trusted Access Manager for Z, the only mainframe solution on the market which enables security leaders to restrict and monitor all activity by privileged identities on the mainframe."

The company says: "organisations can better manage their data and address security and compliance needs with the CA mainframe security suite that includes CA Data Content Discovery and CA Compliance Event Manager that covers new classes of data, new US and European regulatory requirements."

Mark Anzani, vice president of strategy, IBM Z said: "Security and the risk associated with cybercrime is a rising concern for all enterprises.

"With IBM z14 and the solutions CA provides, our mutual customers can address these security and compliance challenges, while innovating rapidly to drive their business."

So, how does CA say you can "control costs in the application economy?"

This is where the company spruiks its "CA Dynamic Capacity Intelligence," whereby "businesses can avoid unplanned spikes in capacity usage to better manage costs by achieving SLA objectives with predictable monthly license charges."

We're informed that "Customers can continually analyse workloads and dynamically move capacity to where and when it’s needed, providing IT and business stakeholders a predictable and proactive way to ensure critical workloads are completed."

Manfred Hartmann, managing director, MHB IT Consulting said: "While lowering costs is important, arguably IT needs to guarantee SLA objectives for critical workloads.

“I have observed that CA Dynamic Capacity Intelligence provides rapid customer value by streamlining operations, while also ensuring critical workloads received the capacity they needed. It also helped predict costs more accurately, which for one company resulted in nearly a 10% cost reduction.”

So, alongside this article covering the Day 1 announcements of last week's CA World 17, as well as the 14 videos that I recorded at the event, the information above covers all of the major announcements at CA World 17.

Knowledge is power, whether it is in your hands, those of your employees and colleagues, and those of your customers and competitors.

What you do with that knowledge is up to you, but ignore it at your peril, for capitalism ensures creative destruction recycles those who refuse to move with the times into new companies, new customers, new opportunities, new apps, new learnings, new insights and new profits.

Good luck!

The writer attended CA World '17 as a guest of CA Technologies.