Archive | May, 2010

Is your key IT talent planning to quit in 2010?

By on May 21, 2010 in Uncategorized

More than half of some 1,200 IT professionals surveyed intend to change jobs in 2010, according to recent data, which shows that the main drivers for high-tech workers to seek new employment are better career opportunities and more monetary compensation.

Retaining IT talent critical to post-recession recovery

“A full-time hiring revival is underway. This month, job postings for those coveted positions on Dice jumped 20% month-over-month, while contract positions were flat. In order to add permanent staff, companies must have confidence in their business outlook — and that’s exactly what we are starting to see. And, there’s no doubt where companies are looking for the fresh talent: your employees,” wrote Tom Silver, Dice senior vice president of North America, in a company report.

Statistics from high-tech employment expert Dice and its Dice Retention Survey released this week show that a majority (51.3%) of IT professionals polled would leave their current employer as the economic recovery gets under way. The number one reason why these high-tech workers would abandon their positions is the belief that better career opportunities exist elsewhere. Coming in second to opportunities was a desire for increased compensation, and IT professionals indicated “frustration with lack of recognition” as the third reason they are looking to put their skills to use for a new employer.

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What is IT service assurance in 2010?

By on May 19, 2010 in Service Assurance

IT managers understand in today’s world they need to monitor multiple disparate components as one cohesive service, but with myriad industry initiatives and emerging technologies it can become difficult to separate the reality from the hype.

The term “service assurance” shouldn’t be considered new, but rather renewed as those watching the IT industry for the past decade recall the mandate for service assurance initiatives once fell mostly upon the shoulders of service providers.

“Service assurnace is one of the pillars of the telecom movement and not surprisingly, it is now expanding beyond telecom and into other things. The lines are blurring between telecom providers and your typical enterprise service management kind of world,” says Glenn O’Donnell, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “It’s a term that is starting to show up a lot more now with enterprise IT managers because what it really amounts to is good old-fashioned monitoring, but it implies a higher-state of monitoring.”

Service assurance enables IT organizations to aggregate data from multiple systems, make sense of it and take action based on the state of the environment and its impact on IT services. Today with internal IT groups competing against new methods of garnering IT services such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud computing, IT service assurance responsibilities now fall to the corporate IT executive. And the mandate to transform a reactive IT group into a proactive service assurance team isn’t hype.

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Weighing IT risk against business reward

By on May 18, 2010 in Service Assurance

Director James Cameron might not be the most obvious choice of speaker at an IT industry conference, but attendees at this year’s CA World ’10 quickly learned that the choices Cameron made in his career can be related to challenges IT managers face daily when tasked with providing more services to the business with fewer resources.

Putting aside the star power Cameron brought to the event, the renowned director of films such as “Avatar”, “Titanic” and “Terminator” shared what he believed he had in common with audience members: his geek pride. While Cameron delved into technologies used in his films and the CA World ’10 crowd focuses on IT technologies, the filmmaker made it clear that fear was not a factor when innovating in his industry.

“Too much caution can be crippling. … Any complex enterprise striving for innovation is a leap of faith,” Cameron told the audience.

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Cloud, customers drive powerful technology partnerships for CA Technologies

By on May 18, 2010 in Service Assurance

Not too long ago, high-tech vendors would stop at nothing to keep their intellectual property private and separate from competitive offerings, arguing the proprietary technology gave them an edge over competitors. Now companies do all they can to communicate to customers and industry watchers how well their wares work with others. In today’s tech world, proprietary is passe and integrated is in.

CA Technologies this week at CA World ’10 rolled video commentary from technology partners Cisco, Citrix, Salesforce.com, VMware and Microsoft during the opening keynote address by Chairman and CEO Bill McCracken. The commentary from competitors proved two things to this industry watcher.

First CA Technologies understands that industry movements such as cloud computing, or paradigm shifts as some are calling it, require myriad moving parts working in concert. That alone requires CA Technologies to open its APIs to others, in this era of cooperative competition.

“Cloud will forever change how we manage IT. In this new era, the entire Internet will be your data center,” Dr. Ajei Gopal, executive vice presidnet of CA Technologies’ Products and Technology Group. “Something big and important is happening in IT, a paradigm shift is under way. We see a historic opportunity in the cloud and we are investing today.”

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‘Sinatra’ sells service assurance at CA World’10

By on May 17, 2010 in Service Assurance

The CA Service Assurance business unit found an interesting way to let customers at CA World ’10 know that CA Technologies will let customers adopt new products and migrate to cloud computing, for instance, their way.

Corporate Vice President and General Manager Cliff Meltzer commandeered the piano while CA Technologies’ Jeff Cobb belted out the lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The opening to the service assurance keynote caught some attendess off-guard, but by delivering an off-beat performance, the CA service assurance team also got the message across: CA Technologies will work with customers to help them manage service quality and delivery, well, their way.

“We have a rock solid vision to partner with and help guide our customers into the future,” Meltzer told attendees, after explaining that he played a bit of piano before logging time at IT vendors such as Cisco and Apple. Meltzer explained to the audience that CA Service Assurance offered deep expertise, highly reliable and scalable products as well as a practical approach to innovation.
“Our job is to deliver dynamic management capabilities” to offer customers the flexibility they need to deploy the best solution for their requirements, he said.

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Service Assurance…New and Improved

By on May 17, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

If you’ve been in this business awhile, probably the first thing about Service Assurance that comes to mind is, didn’t I buy that already? And that’s a fair question. For years you’ve been hearing about the importance of application performance, network capacity and keeping users happy, and have most likely responded by investing in hardware [...]

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Revamped CA Technologies can help customers evolve business via IT

By on May 17, 2010 in Service Assurance

What’s in a name? Plenty, according to the branding powers that be at the company once known as Computer Associates, then CA and now CA Technologies. In this case, not only is change good, it is inevitable, according to CA executives, and with some internal and external updates, the company plans to embrace the IT industry evolution and provide customers with tools and guidance to help them do the same.

Chairman and CEO Bill McCracken told some 7,000 attendees during his opening keynote address at CA World ’10 in Las Vegas about the updated name as well as the company’s “we can” motto. When it comes to helping customers take on technology challenges, CA Technologies new response will simply be “we can.” The updated moniker matches the software maker’s revamped mission to help its customers use technologies such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service, virtualization management, mainframe 2.0 and security to enable their businesses to rapidly respond to changing market needs.

“IT will not be in a year as it this year,” McCracken explained to the audience, detailing the three drivers that push industry advances such as cloud computing: economic conditions, technology capabilities and user need. Considering the history-making recession the U.S. and other markets are just now starting to recover from, McCracken said there is no doubt cloud computing is coming in full force. “Nothing is going to stop this,” he declared.

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Drumroll Please….Our New Blogger Is….

By on May 14, 2010 in Uncategorized

Welcome Denise Dubie to CA as the newest member of the CA Service Assurance team! Denise, who as most of you know spent the last 12 years at Network World, is the new Editor of ServiceAssuranceDaily.com (formerly the NetQoS corporate blog – NetworkPerformanceDaily.com). We are thrilled to have her!

We launched this blog in October 2006 with the idea of writing stories that appeal to network engineers and IT people in general. We made it as independent as a corporate blog can ever be, with a separate Web site and a blogger – Brian Boyko – who loved tech and resisted corporate shilling as much as he could. We never wanted the blog to be about NetQoS all the time. We wanted to inform, educate, and often entertain. And we think Brian did just that, as our following attests.

Since launching Network Performance Daily, we’ve received more than 400,000 unique visitors and have been linked to by the Washington Post, Network World, PC World, ComputerWorld, LinuxToday, the Huffington Post, BoingBoing.net, The Register, Security Focus, Ars Technica, eWeek, DailyKos, and have been on the front page of Digg.com, Programming.reddit.com and Dzone.com. Most notably, we’ve been listed on Slashdot seven times since the blog’s inception.

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A little birdie has some exciting news!

By on May 7, 2010 in Uncategorized

We thought we’d experiment with Twitter Media’s new Blackbird Pie feature to let you all know some exciting news!

We’ve finally hired a new blogger for NetworkPerformanceDaily.com! She’s someone I’m willing to bet you all know!less than a minute ago via webCA Service Assurance
CAsvcAssur


More information to come next week. Stay tuned….

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Are you experienced…in your customers’ experiences?

By on May 4, 2010 in CA Technologies on APM

by Brian Bakstran, Vice President of Product Marketing, CA Service Assurance

First, my apologies to Jimi Hendrix. Second, companies pay lip service to customer service all the time, but monitoring and improving it in today’s complex IT environments is a tall order. Let me begin with my own personal example that I know everyone has shared.

In March I was going to New York on vacation with my family for a few days. I love the city. I was referred to a very nice hotel (which will remain nameless to protect the innocent) and called them to make a reservation. What happened next was something we’ve all experienced: I was thrown into the proverbial voicemail loop of pressing numbers trying to get a human being on the phone. After awhile I lost patience and hung up. Later that day I tried again. This time I eventually got a human being on the phone, but she quickly put me on hold to help another customer. After being on hold for several minutes, I got frustrated and hung up. They lost my business for good. I booked a Marriott, and we ended up having a great time. They made some good money off of me during that stay. Maybe the other hotel did not need my money.

You might say: I’m only one customer so what’s the big deal? I would guess if the owners of the hotel knew about it they would not be happy. But, they never found out I am sure.
This is just one example of bad service, a seemingly innocent interaction that simply did not go well. It’s not a big issue if a hotel chain loses one customer, right? Does it really matter in the long run?

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