ENGINEERING

CA Technologies announced it received high functionality marks in Forrester Research's December 2011 report: Market Overview: Application Performance Management, Q4 2011. The report evaluated 26 vendors on APM functionality based on Forrester's APM Reference Model.

CA Technologies achieved the highest marks possible for functionality in eight out of ten categories and the second-highest marks for functionality in the other two categories.

Vendors were evaluated in ten categories of APM functionality: 1) End user experience monitoring using a passive appliance; 2) Response time monitoring using a scripted robot or active agent; 3) Transaction tracing and mapping; 4) Application monitoring (Java and .NET); 5) Packaged application monitoring (Oracle, SAP etc.); 6) Infrastructure monitoring (including virtualization); 7) Database performance monitoring; 8) Messaging technology monitoring; 9) Monitoring of applications in public cloud (IaaS); and 10) Dashboard reporting and analytics.

According to the report, "the current complexity of business services is such that issues can spring from anywhere in the service delivery chain. Consequently, application performance management (APM) must now monitor, detect, and identify any abnormal behavior across the whole hardware and software infrastructure."

The report's author, JP Garbani, vice President and principal analyst, Forrester, summarized CA Technologies offering: "CA is traditionally one of the leaders in APM with Wily Introscope. This is complemented by a full array of solutions (CEM, NetQos, Spectrum, eHealth, etc.) to bring together a complete solution of 'Service Assurance.' The recent addition of CA APM Cloud Monitor (formerly Watchmouse) reinforces an already impressive and complete solution."

"We feel that this report is evidence of how CA Technologies value roadmaps for APM are helping enterprises and service providers transition from simply managing and maintaining IT to delivering value with Business Service Innovation," said Mike Sargent, general manager, Service Assurance, CA Technologies. "CA APM enables more than 1,500 of the world's largest companies and governments to achieve new levels of speed, innovation, and performance while balancing cost and risk. By providing monitoring, predictive analytics, and performance optimization across the entire IT value chain, we are helping our customers achieve service levels and reliability amidst ever-increasing complexity and user expectations."

CA APM monitors all Web and non-Web transactions in real time as they traverse the hybrid-cloud infrastructure (physical, virtual, cloud and mainframe) to help proactively identify, diagnose and resolve problems before end users are affected and assure service-delivery levels meet business objectives. By mapping all transactions to the supporting infrastructure, CA APM provides a thorough understanding of the end-user experience that allows application support and network operations teams to pinpoint failing components and bottlenecks quickly, identify high-value transactions that may be at risk and prioritize incidents based on business impact. This business-centric approach delivers the vital visibility required to optimize the performance of critical transactions and revenue-generating services, and put customers firmly in control of the end-user experience.