CA Strengthens Ties with VMware

Earlier this week at the CA World conference in Las Vegas, CA and VMware announced they had begun work on a long-term partnership to develop a family of systems management products centered on VMware's virtualization platform. According to a CA statement issued at CA World, the first sign of the partnership was a new level of interoperability between VMware Stage Manager and CA's Data Center Automation Manager product.

"This is really the start of a much deeper relationship with VMware," said Stephen Elliot, VP of business unit strategy at CA. "We'll be doing some joint sales and marketing, co-selling to join accounts, and sales training. It's really an extension of our existing relationship." Elliot explained that CA and VMware have been working together on various products for more than 3 years, starting with CA's Unicenter Advanced Systems Manager (CA ASM) product.

The agreement should help VMware compete more effectively against Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM2008), a combination that allows IT pros to manage both physical and virtual machines using a management console that Microsoft executives have has referred to as a "single pane of glass".

The partnership also extends into the cloud, with CA already announcing support for VMware's Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS) and vCloud platforms. "With CA Data Center Automation manager, we can provision the cloud as well" says Elliot. "We're looking [at helping IT pros] manage change and implement automation in the cloud. Security in the cloud is a big concern for customers, and CA helps provide that security."

CA also announced that they their CA Advanced Systems Management product can enhance the capability of VMware vCenter, primarily by leveraging CA’s Dynamic Resource Brokering (DRB) technology and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) capability. CA also announced that they've become a member of the VMware Ready Program and the VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative.

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