Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SSA) wins kudos from Enterprise Management Associates.
Business service management (BSM) technologies range from monitoring services to providing dashboards to calculating financial impact of IT performance. Multiple vendors offer myriad products, and analysts at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) noted products available today from CA Technologies among the “value leaders” in a recent Radar report.
EMA released in June its Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact report for the third quarter of 2010. The paper included analysis of BSM functionally, market and vendor offerings. EMA describes BSM in the report as: “Optimizing IT processes and technologies to more effectively manage, monitor, measure and govern IT from a holistic contribution perspective in terms of costs, value and competitiveness.”
The analyst firm also noted that no one vendor product can be applied successful to every customer environment without a thorough evaluation process. “The Radar Report can only be a starting place and a guideline. It can inform you of the market and short-cut your process to developing a short list,” the report states.
Yet EMA also uses the document to acknowledge existing products from vendors such as CA Technologies that stand out. According to EMA, CA Technologies’ Spectrum Service Assurance Manager (SSA) provided the vendor with a bit of a head start among competitors.
“SSA was not only a true, model-based BSM dashboard, but was the tip of the wedge for introducing CA’s Unified Service Model and Catalyst integration architecture more broadly,” the report states. “CA adds to the strong infrastructure, application and user experience monitoring, as well as world class [service-level agreement] contract management.”
The Radar report goes on to say that “CA can deliver comparatively fast time-to-value for a platform-level solution especially when CA monitoring solutions (Spectrum, Wily, eHealth, etc) are already in deployment.”
Separate research conducted earlier this year by EMA Research Director Jim Frey also touted SSA’s capabilities when coupled with other CA products in a customer IT environment. With APIs into other third-party management systems, Frey wrote that SSA “is a cap-stone offering that will draw metrics from CA’s suite of well-established infrastructure management products.”
“Add an impressive set of role-based dashboards, service modeling and innovative quality and risk indicator features, and the result is a compelling service management offering,” Frey concluded.
EMA also noted strengths in BSM Service Impact related products from AccelOps, Compuware, Interlink Software, Novell, OPNET, ASG, FireScope, HP, IBM, Netuitive, OpTier and Zyrion.
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