News

CA World: Kumar touts Sonar for on-demand computing

• By Rich Seeley
• July 15, 2003

Building on an extensive background in IT management software, Sanjay Kumar, chairman and CEO at Computer Associates (CA) International Inc., unveiled a new product initiative to support on-demand computing at CA World in Las Vegas this week.

In his keynote address at the opening of the user group meeting, Kumar told his IT customers that the on-demand computing model he envisions will provide flexibility to manage the increasingly complex mix of today’s business and technology issues.

Chiding gurus who make predictions about the future of business computing, Kumar told his audience: “We don’t know, in many cases, the shape of things to come.” In his view, the key to handling whatever comes is to manage IT resources in the on-demand model.

The CA view of on-demand computing, which he said would be a “hot topic” in the near future, is not about outsourcing or necessarily buying more hardware and software. As Kumar outlined it for his audience, on-demand is managing existing assets to meet changing business objectives for key applications in areas such as transactions and information exchange.

This is where Sonar, which Kumar explained is still the internal code for a yet-unnamed technology, will extend CA’s traditional automated management products to handle on-demand computing.

As Kumar explained it, Sonar is patented and patent-pending intelligence technology for providing IT managers with an overview of their “on-demand infrastructure.” It is designed to show the correlation between how systems are working and how they are meeting or missing business objectives. Sonar will provide assessments of the business impact of infrastructure failures and pinpoint potential security problems and identify their causes.

In a business climate where IT managers are under increasing pressure to show ROI results, Sonar will bring “business relevance to IT management,” according to the Sonar announcement released following Kumar’s keynote. Company officials said the Sonar technology will be incorporated into CA management products for on-demand computing, including new versions of Unicenter now in beta.