CA Technologies and Unisys Corporation have announced that they have extended their alliance to offer joint solutions that accelerate customers' path from virtualization to the cloud. The solutions will combine CA Technologies' virtualization management, service automation, and service management products with Unisys' virtualization and cloud advisory, planning, design and implementation services.
The first solution, available now in North America, is designed to help organizations overcome "virtual stall" - the complications that can arise from enterprise virtualization projects. According to the vendors, this is a challenge for enterprises - both in their existing data centers and as they evolve their infrastructure toward cloud computing.
This joint solution also represents a major step in Unisys' strategy to help enterprise customers implement cloud computing to extend their data center capabilities while continuing to leverage existing IT investments.
When virtualizing IT environments on their way to the cloud, organizations often run into challenges after about 30 or 40% of deployment has taken place, due to factors such as added complexity, staffing requirements, service level agreement (SLA) management, and departmental politics, according to the companies. Issues such as these can prevent them from being able to achieve the full benefit of virtualization and slows the process down, Yale Tankus, vice president, business development, Virtualization and Automation, CA, tells 5 Minute Briefing. This "virtual stall" can significantly delay the realization of key benefits of virtualization such as infrastructure responsiveness and availability and cost reduction
The joint CA Technologies-Unisys solution blends CA Technologies service catalog, process automation, self-service provisioning, configuration management - as well as charge back/accounting capabilities - with Unisys' expert advisory, planning, design and implementation services. This combination of technology and services gives customers a better way to provision, control, secure, and optimize complex multi-vendor IT environments.
The joint solution will help customers progress in their efforts to achieve the full benefits of virtualization in their IT infrastructure, says Colin Lacey, vice president, Data Center Transformation Services and Solutions, Unisys. "The ultimate end state we believe they want to get to is a cloud-based environment but there are critical stages along the way that they have to resolve first."
CA Technologies and Unisys plan to expand the range of solutions they offer to help customers create private, hybrid and public clouds by providing unified management of physical and virtual environments, along with automation that spans IT domains and critical IT service management processes.
For more information about the CA and Unisys partnership, go here.