CA Technologies: A Business of Digital Transformation

IT management software and solutions company CA Technologies has been a long-standing USGIF Organizational Member since October 2009. The software and solutions from CA Technologies help agencies thrive in the application economy by delivering the means to deploy, monitor, and secure their applications and infrastructure. Trajectory spoke with Colin Thomas, senior account director at CA Technologies, to learn more about the company and its role in the GEOINT Community.

What is your company’s background and how did it get started?

CA Technologies is one of the world’s leading providers of information technology management software and systems. Our systems help organizations plan, develop, manage, and secure applications and IT infrastructure that increase productivity and enhance competitiveness in their businesses. We do this across a wide range of environments, such as mainframe, distributed, cloud, and mobile.

CA Technologies software and systems have been powering innovation for more than 35 years. Founded in 1976, we have approximately 11,500 employees in more than 45 countries helping organizations thrive in a world where every business is in the software business.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of shifting from traditional structures, processes, and systems to new, digital operations to meet the needs of today’s highly connected, fast moving, and digitally-enabled world. Core to this transformation is the ability to be agile and adapt quickly in a changing environment. Agencies can no longer wait 12-18 months to deliver an application to their customers because by then the market has shifted— and that’s what we’re looking to do in the Intelligence Community. The world is constantly shifting. Look at the Arab Spring and how quickly it arose. Industry didn’t necessarily have the software ready or tool sets available for analysts to manipulate open-source intelligence and overlay it onto classified intelligence. Now, we’re helping analysts develop new software in hours instead of months and years. Digital transformation is turning an old process into an agile one to help organizations react much faster to world change.

What are your core capabilities and who are your customers?

Our core technology capabilities support areas of security, agile management, and DevOps helping organizations plan, develop, deploy, manage, and secure applications and IT infrastructure. We work with the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community as well as some of the most powerful companies in the world, including more than half of the Global Fortune 500 companies and the largest 25 federal agencies.

One product we offer specific to the GEOINT space is CA API Gateway, which helps bring together multiple sources of data or intelligence into a single format for sharing. For example, if an organization has a satellite image or other type of data they want to overlay, our solution helps convert it to an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-standard format for display. Additionally, CA Live API Creator helps generate APIs automatically from databases, allowing organizations to accelerate the availability of data for all types of applications.

What research and development initiatives is your organization pursuing?

CA is committed to research and development. We encourage our industry partners to visit our CA Labs website. We’re doing research in architecture and software engineering, business management, security management, software development, the cloud, and more.

What differentiates CA Technologies?

There are many capabilities that differentiate CA from other vendors. One key item is our understanding of the Intelligence Community and the direction in which it’s headed. For instance, we understand programs of record cannot take 12-18 months to get features and functionality out there. We know you have to be agile and move quickly. And we don’t just talk about agile—we adopted the approach as a company to better and more quickly navigate market shifts. It allows us to use best practices to drive the transformation of how we do business and how the market is doing business.

We have coaches available to help people navigate the agile processes as well as the tools to back it up in our agile management and DevOps portfolios. The suite helps agencies accelerate the development process and support application performance. We understand the digital transformation process, not just from the technology and tools perspective, but also from the people and process perspective.

Does CA Technologies have any recent news or announcements?

This year, CA acquired privileged identity management solutions provider Xceedium. The proxy-based, gateway approach from Xceedium provides privileged access control over cloud, on-premise, virtualized, and hybrid IT environments, helping protect the systems driving the application economy. In November, we announced a new version of CA Privileged Access Manager (the former Xceedium product) specifically supporting privileged user access to dynamic VMware NSX environments.

Additionally, we’ve acquired Rally Software Development Corp., an agile development software and services provider. Rally’s acquisition is a significant milestone in CA’s strategy to help customers thrive in the application economy.

Photo Credit: CA Technologies