CA Technologies today announced the newest release of its CA Project and Portfolio Management (CA PPM) solution. CA PPM is the first solution to provide critical management and business insights from across the enterprise improving strategic decision-making for agile businesses operating within the increasingly competitive application economy.

“Successful business and technology leaders require management insights across a number of disciplines.  Unfortunately, these types of insights are typically fragmented across a patchwork of applications and desktop tools, making decision-making and trend analysis difficult and slow,” said James Harvey, general manager, IT Business Management, CA Technologies. “CA PPM’s new business intelligence capability gives leaders and managers the insights that support integrated thinking and decision making – resulting in better business execution.”

CA PPM is available via the cloud or on-premise, and enables companies of all sizes to prioritize strategic initiatives and mobilize the right resources. It gives managers fast and easy access to the critical project / initiative information needed to collaborate and make on-the-go portfolio decisions. By facilitating rapid and accurate decision-making, CA PPM helps ensure teams execute on time and achieve goals within budget. CA PPM SaaS is part of the CA Management Cloud, a portfolio of easy-to-use, easy-to-own solutions that help organizations manage their technology assets like a business.

Unlocking business intelligence and insight
The new release of CA PPM democratizes key data by introducing the first and only integrated Business Intelligence capability for PPM – synthesizing the Project, Product and Financial insights organizations need to take action without sacrificing performance.

According to Gartner, “organizations are simultaneously demanding greater project collaboration capabilities to deal with more challenging projects and improved portfolio analytics to better manage portfolio risk.” *

CA PPM addresses this need by providing a built-in Data Warehouse. Requiring no configuration or customization, it delivers the first embedded PPM/Business Intelligence experience of its kind – enabling business, strategy and IT teams to focus on informed planning and disciplined execution of their portfolios.

“Helping our business leaders fully understand our project portfolio, commitments and interdependencies, while leveraging Microsoft Project and other familiar tools, were key considerations in our PPM tool selection,” said Greg Miller, vice president, PMO, CareFirst. “CA PPM helps us develop the insight we need into the project portfolio, assists us in managing our projects in a highly dynamic environment.  It also helps us evaluate new initiatives and spot resource bottlenecks or misalignment, and then quickly take corrective action.”

Rapidly connecting people and process to drive profit
The speed of the application economy exposes a disconnect between people, process and the tools they use. CA PPM solves this by connecting business and IT teams with insights through the most robust and fastest-performing PPM integration to Microsoft Project.

Project leaders can also use one workspace to manage updates and provide insights to business leaders through the Microsoft Project integration. An exclusive field mapping capability gives governance stakeholders the key financial, resource and project details in one single plan. With the ability to scale from traditional ‘Waterfall’ to modern Scaled Agile Framework methodologies, only CA PPM provides the breadth and visibility to connect strategy to execution across the entire project and product portfolio.

Today’s announcement was made from Gartner PPM & IT Governance Summit 2015 in Grapevine, TX, where CA Technologies also announced it was positioned by Gartner in the Leaders quadrant of the new “Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Software Applications, Worldwide.”