CA Technologies wants to transform businesses into modern software factories with the release of the CA Automic One Automation platform version 12.1.
CA acquired the automation software provider Automic in December of last year in order to bolster its cloud automation portfolio. This is the first major release under the CA name since the acquisition.
The 12.1 release includes three major themes: intelligent automation, modern software factories, and agility for Ops.
According to the company, a modern software factory is necessary in order for organizations to transform their businesses into software businesses. To be successful, these new businesses need to provide faster times to market, deliver greater velocity with reliable quality, and guarantee software security. While the need for speed and agility has already been well established in the industry, according to Rob Gidron, technology evangelist for CA Automic, enterprises only apply agility to a fraction of their business because they aren’t getting enough gain for their buck. “What they are not getting yet is the capabilities to truly act on that vision for everything they do,” he said. “What we have been building and establishing our business on is this need for an automation strategy that can actually handle the old and the new, the containers and the mainframe, the mobile and the ERPs. That is something that we have been doing at Automic for a very long time, and is part of our strategy with CA now.”
To free up a business’ time and investment, the release focuses on giving software teams the ability to get work done earlier in the lifecycle. “For instance, a lot more testing is done in the early stages of development and QA versus what used to be the case back in the days of waterfall. This, together with the added volume of changes and the need to automate many of these tasks, has become somewhat of a bottomless pit for development teams who are taking on more responsibility for tasks such as setting up the right environments and data needed for testing,” said Gidron.
The release features environment blueprinting, provisioning capabilities, enhanced code-level access, a chatbot interface, new technical enhancements around scale, zero-touch self-service capabilities and intelligent automation capabilities to automate within the DevOps toolchain.
“Enterprises continue to leverage well-defined, highly automated processes to enable software to be developed in shorter cycles and deployed into production at higher velocity,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer at CA Technologies. “This represents the Modern Software Factory, and as it evolves, Intelligent Automation offers key potential to enhance a more agile enterprise. By enabling enterprises to move from traditional process automation to Intelligent Business Automation, CA Automic delivers on the promise of the fully automated enterprise.”
