CA Technologies Delivers Ground-Breaking CA Mainframe Chorus Solution to Help Control Costs, Increase Productivity and Agility

ISLANDIA, N.Y., Dec. 6, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- CA Technologies (Nasdaq: CA) today announced that CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management are available now.

CA Mainframe Chorus is the most important innovation yet in CA Technologies Mainframe 2.0 strategy to simplify mainframe management, and help this critical platform to continue to be an effective and integral part of our customers' evolving IT infrastructures.  It offers management capabilities that are designed to appeal to the next generation mainframe staff while also offering significant productivity improvements to today's mainframe experts.

"The most critical challenges faced by mainframe customers are to control costs, increase productivity, sustain high levels of mainframe skills amongst employees, and enhance the agility of the platform to meet their business needs," said Dayton Semerjian, general manager, Mainframe, CA Technologies.  "CA Mainframe Chorus is a ground breaking innovation that addresses all these concerns by simplifying mainframe management through integration, automation, and modernization, thereby helping the mainframe to continue to help power the global economy."

CA Mainframe Chorus helps:

• Reduce the time and effort required to securely manage the mainframe environment.  
• Enable faster problem resolution and improved service levels.
• Increase productivity for current expert mainframe staff and more rapid on-ramping of new staff.

CA Mainframe Chorus' role-based integrated management workspace, rich data visualization, modern GUI, and advanced knowledge capture and transfer capabilities, help redefine the future of mainframe management.

Each CA Mainframe Chorus role leverages functionality from the CA software that supports a key management discipline.  CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management is the first role bringing together features from seven individual CA tools that support IBM® DB2® for z/OS® in the unified workspace.

Customers including Health Care Services Corporation, SCANA and Tieto have commented on the strong business value they've realized with Chorus*:

Health Care Services Corporation

"The Mainframe will continue to be critical to our IT operation well into the future – you can't effectively support our applications and workloads on a distributed platform," said Russ Nejdl, senior director, enterprise technology services at Health Care Services Corporation, which supports over 12 million Blue Cross Blue Shield customers across 4 mid-west states. "With an average age of 60 on our mainframe staff, we've already begun to hire young talent to help support over 200 different products, so we are excited about the potential for CA Mainframe Chorus to help us maximize productivity of our entire staff, and help make it easier for our experts to train our new hires."

SCANA

"We are pleased to see CA Technologies taking a leadership position and delivering such game-changing innovation targeted at its customers' needs and engaging with its customers so closely," said Randy Senn, CIO for SCANA Corporation, a Fortune 500 energy-based holding company.  "We see great potential in CA's vision and in the benefit of CA Mainframe Chorus to SCANA's operation."

"SCANA recognizes that to continue delivering quality energy services to its over one million customers, the mainframe and DB2 specifically need to be managed effectively and perform proficiently," said Efrain Berdecia, newest DBA team member for SCANA Corporation.  "With CA Mainframe Chorus, we anticipate having a shorter learning curve for novice users, faster problem solving of DB2 for z/OS related performance issues, and increased productivity for the whole team."

Tieto

"To help meet our goals for increased efficiency, while maintaining services levels for customers in high transaction industries like banking, insurance and telecommunications, we have been reducing the costs of managing our mainframe environment," said Juha Parnisto, director of mainframe environments for Tieto, a leading IT service provider in Northern Europe.  "We've already created a consolidated mainframe environment, leveraging 120 CA Mainframe products, including CA Mainframe Software Manager to reduce our costs, and foresee huge benefits from the automation and simplified management in CA Mainframe Chorus."

"We are particularly interested in the new knowledge sharing features in CA Mainframe Chorus that pass information to younger specialists, helping us with a key training challenge we will face in the near future," continued Parnisto.

Key benefits specific to CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management (highlighted by customers) include:

• Increasing productivity and faster problem solving via enhanced visualization of data and historical data comparative capabilities
• Saving time and money with simplified management of complex DB2 for z/OS workloads
• Optimizing DB2 for z/OS performance by proactively monitoring DB2 for z/OS thresholds and alerts, more quickly identifying and resolving DB2 for z/OS bottlenecks and leveraging displayed historical data to predict trends
• Simplifying mentoring of new staff and accelerating the ability to expertly manage DB2 through instant access to decades of DB2 experience and ongoing knowledge management capture and transfer capabilities

CA Technologies Mainframe 2.0  management strategy helps organizations to maximize platform value and workforce agility by simplifying its management through integration, automation, and modernization.

For more information on CA Mainframe Chorus and CA Mainframe Chorus for DB2 Database Management visit http://www.ca.com/us/products/detail/CA-Mainframe-Chorus.aspx.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100516/NY05617LOGO )

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments – from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at www.ca.com.

Follow CA Technologies

• Twitter
• Social Media Page
• Press Releases
• Podcasts

Legal Notices

Copyright © 2010 CA. All Rights Reserved. One CA Plaza, Islandia, N.Y. 11749. IBM and z/OS are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

*Some information in this press release is based upon CA and customer experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of development and customer environments. Past performance of the software product in such development and customer environments is not indicative of the future performance of such software product in identical, similar or different environments. CA does not warrant that the software product will operate as specifically set forth in this press release.

SOURCE CA Technologies