Just how smart is your smartphone?

By on June 1, 2010 in Ask the Service Assurance Expert

That’s the question CA Technologies asked North American college students when it challenged them to create a smart monitoring app for BlackBerry devices.

Managing your net from your iPhone

CA Technologies recently challenged North American university students to partake in a competition to infuse BlackBerry devices with intelligent monitoring applications, one of the software maker’s favorite technologies.

The CA Smartphone Challenge inspired one team of technology lovers to create an application that could enable IT operations managers and application managers to monitor performance of critical apps from a BlackBerry smartphone. CA Technologies put forth the challenge prior to its CA World 2010 conference in Las Vegas last month, offering a free trip to the show as part of the prize package for the winning team. The competition, which was open from March 3 through April 21 to universities across North America, attracted 14 university teams, but just one could be named winner.

The winning team, from Stony Brook University, developed an application dubbed “Pocket Monitor,” which is said to provide mobile access of application performance management (APM) data on the BlackBerry. (The top three teams also received cash prizes and BlackBerry 9530 phones.) The first-place team would also be tasked to man the CA Technologies’ booth at CA World and demonstrate their winning app to show goers.

Pocket Monitor lets IT managers tap “real-time Introscope graphs” and drill into performance alerts from the top down. It also offers a customized dashboard and an e-mail notification and alerting feature. The application enables IT managers to adjust thresholds and ensure business-critical transactions are able to complete without require the IT operations managers to be on site to implement the changes. The Pocket Monitor works with the Introscope technology in the CA Wily Application Performance Management division.

The CA Smartphone Challenge is just one of many initiatives by the vendor to engage students in its business. Earlier this spring, CA Technologies welcomed a sixth-grade student to its New York offices to take the helm as President for a Day.

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Denise Dubie

About Denise Dubie

Service Assurance Daily is managed by Denise Dubie, former senior editor of Network World. Denise's official title at CA is New Media Principal. Prior to coming to CA, Dubie spent 12 years of her career at Network World, an IDG company. Working as Copy Chief in the copy editing department for two years, Dubie made an internal move at Network World in 2000 to report and write about IT management technologies (from CA and competitors) as well as high-tech careers and vendors such as Cisco, HP, IBM and Microsoft. As Senior Editor at Network World, Dubie also authored the publication's twice-weekly Network and Systems Management Alert newsletter and contributed to the Web site's Microsoft Subnet blog. Before IDG, she served as Assistant Managing Editor at Application Development Trends, managing writers and the monthly publication's production process. And Dubie started her professional journalism career as a Staff Writer and Reporter at The Transcript, a small daily paper in Western Massachusetts. Dubie holds a B.A. degree in English Literature, with minors in journalism and political science, from Boston University.
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