CA Service Management Suite

In our technology-dependent business world, IT functions are subject to the enterprise-wide mandates to – ‘deliver more with less, demonstrate consistent business value and maximize the availability of business-critical services at an optimal cost.’   CA Technologies’ portfolio of IT service management (ITSM) solutions is an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3-aligned, fully integrated software suite that can help an IT organization address these mission critical challenges by improving service levels, controlling costs, and mitigating exposure to risks.

 

CA’s suite of advanced, market leading ITSM solutions (available on-premise & on-demand) is the realization technology for IT to emerge as a true business enabler when coupled with ITSM expert services from Digital Celerity.

 

Service Desk and Self-Service

CA’s service desk offering, CA Service Desk Manager, is an enterprise-level solution designed to facilitate the deployment of the incident, problem, knowledge, change, configuration, and release management processes. It is positioned as the single point of human contact for the logging, tracking, escalating, consolidating, and managing of all IT-related incidents, problems, and service requests. The solution is aligned with the ITIL v3 best-practice framework and CA’s stated goal of a unified service model to ‘simplify and unify’ all the processes that govern, manage, and secure IT. CA Service Desk Manager’s latest release (r12.1) now incorporates other popular CA products such as CA Service Desk Knowledge Tools, CA SupportBridge (a tool to enable support automation), and CA CMDB, which were separately licensed in earlier releases.

CA Service Desk Manager functionality includes the automatic generation of tickets/incidents based on events reported by CA’s application performance management and infrastructure management solutions and CA Network and Systems Management solutions, with a full audit trail of all incidents and problems to meet various regulatory and compliance requirements. The Service Desk Dashboard provides IT managers and staff with easy access to historical and real-time data via graphical and tabular views of incidents, problems, and changes and key metrics related to self-service and knowledge management. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can also be defined and viewed via the dashboard to provide a complete overview of service desk operations with added value through drill-down capabilities.

The self-service interface provides end users with the ability to open tickets, check the status of tickets, and access frequently asked questions (FAQs) and other help functions. Knowledge Tools, through which knowledge documents can be created, verified, and uploaded to an IT knowledge base, is an optional add-on module that is integrated with the self-service portal to provide end-users with access to knowledge documents. Supported by a powerful search function, users have immediate access to context-specific solutions, offering the potential for IT organisations to drive down support costs through a platform that delivers issue resolution at level zero.

Service Desk Manager’s Web-based analyst and administrator interface provides support for complex workflow and business rules automation and, from the end-user’s perspective, modifications to the end-user Web interface can be easily achieved through the drag-and-drop tools included in the solution. Administrators can also integrate and incorporate the functionality of home-grown or third-party applications with Service Desk by means of a Web services-based application programming interface (API). CA Service Desk Manager ships with a common workflow engine that support personnel can use to build workflows of varying levels of complexity with decision trees, the execution of parallel tasks, and use of the company’s organisational structure to determine escalation and authorisation contacts.

 

Effective change management can help an organisation to ensure that changes to its IT services and technology infrastructure are professionally managed, documented, tested, planned, and scheduled with minimal risk, impact, and customer inconvenience. CA Service Desk Manager delivers against these requirements and can also meet corporate compliance requirements, as well as facilitate fact-based estimation of service demand in the enhancement of change management and service delivery efficiency.

Built on the CA Service Desk architecture, CA’s configuration management database is a functional data repository for the management of configuration information. The CMDB facilitates the consolidation and reconciliation of IT-related data from disparate sources, providing visibility of configuration item (CI) information such as resource attributes, relationships, and dependencies. CA CMDB ships with CA Cohesion Application Configuration Manager for discovering servers and complex applications involving many tiers of interdependent components such as applications, database and Web servers, integration software and middleware, portals, custom components and more.

CA Service Desk Manager is very tightly integrated with CA CMDB to provide the seamless transfer of information between the two entities. As well as leveraging the sub-components of CA Service Desk, CA CMDB also includes the CMDB Visualizer, a utility that graphically illustrates the relationships between CIs in the CMBD to facilitate a better understanding of service impact. CA CMDB includes predefined attributes for upwards of 60 CI families, 190 CI classes, and 90 CI relationship types – in addition to over 200 queries – to facilitate a speedy insight into an organisation’s IT infrastructure. CA CMDB also has built-in Web services support for the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification standard.

The efficient and seamless integration between CA solutions is enabled through the use of a shared data schema, which serves as the ‘single source of truth’ for all data. This is part of CA’s vision of enterprise IT management (EITM), which also enables the use of a single user interface for navigation through all integrated CA solutions.

Service Level and Catalog Management

CA Service Catalog is targeted at streamlining the delivery of IT services through the self-service provision of all available IT services via a Web store. These services can include access to applications, the procurement of new hardware (or access to hardware as a managed service), or new software that can be automatically provisioned. CA Service Catalog provides capabilities for users to check on their service request, including where it is in the approval cycle and its fulfilment status in line with agreed service levels. The Catalog Service Offering Builder allows IT to define and update service offerings along with relevant SLAs and other actionable metrics. CA Workflow, a common workflow engine across CA products, can be used to automate the process, and CA Embedded Entitlements Manager can be used to enforce authentication and role-based access along with single sign-on capabilities. Importantly, only the services that users have sufficient privileges and access rights to request are displayed to them through the Web store.  The tight integration of CA Service Catalog and CA Service Accounting provides businesses with visibility into IT service costs and consumption by business unit. Businesses can then implement corporate cost allocation for IT services based on actual usage and business rules, and generate billing adjustments for breaches in service quality. By automatically allocating costs and reporting on service consumption information in real-time, the business can influence what services users can request based on desired cost, features, and service levels.

Once implemented with CA Service Desk Manager (or any third-party service desk), CA Service Catalog provides key automation capabilities that are integral to maintaining optimal service management levels. CA Service Catalog can deliver a more proactive approach than the standard service desk interface and, by publishing all available IT services via a Web UI and combining them with the knowledge base within CA Service Desk Manager, organisations can both better streamline the service delivery process and manage down the considerable people costs associated with delivery.
CA Oblicore Guarantee now provides CA and its customers with an industry-leading service level management solution that supplies a comprehensive and complementary solution to CA Service Catalog.

IT Asset and Client Management

CA IT Asset Manager provides a portfolio view of all corporate IT assets, from both a usage and a financial perspective, across the asset lifecycle, including planning, requisitioning, procurement, and disposal. In addition, it helps to optimise an organisation’s investments in IT and prevent overspending on unnecessary purchases. Administrators have the ability to control and analyse hardware and software assets from a business perspective and, to this effect, it offers capabilities around financial management, vendor management, contract management, software licence management, and request management. Key features of CA IT Asset Manager include the ability to track and categorise all asset-related expenditure, greater visibility into vendor relationships, and the ability to ensure compliance with licensing agreements.

CA IT Client Manager offers the ability to track and manage configurations, patches and updates for client devices across the enterprise. Its automation capabilities streamline the discovery of IT assets and the classification of software and hardware inventory. It enables administrators to track and maintain hardware and software assets, create automated migrations to new hardware and operating systems, and ensure security across all enterprise client devices. Importantly, the solution can aid IT organisations in dealing with the constant stream of critical operating system and application patches, multiple hardware platforms, inconsistent OS versions, non-stop PC replacement cycles, and evolving security threats.

CA IT Client Manager directly addresses the complexity and volume of system management tasks that continue to drive up the cost of asset ownership and lead to problems with performance, availability, security, and compliance. It enables the proactive, automated lifecycle management of desktops and servers by allowing customer organisations to define policies that govern the delivery of patches and updates, and by providing real-time insight into assets and automating critical lifecycle management processes such as inventory, deployment, patch management, maintenance, and migration.

Let us show you why Digital Celerity is a trusted partner to highly successful IT organizations enabling business value for their respective companies worldwide. 

 

 

• Move faster, responding to infrastructure changes at the speed of business
• Reduce downtime, ensure revenue streams, improve customer experience
• Provide a portfolio view of all projects and resources across IT
• Reduce risks while simplifying delivery and IT support