CA and VMware have announced an expansion in their long-standing relationship centered around the creation and delivery of integrated management solutions to complement the VMware virtualization platform. The relationship is aimed at helping enterprise IT organizations and cloud service providers manage virtualization for maximum business impact, while extending its benefits beyond basic server consolidation and cost reduction. The companies plan to jointly develop a management solution to maximize IT agility, service quality, cost efficiency and risk avoidance.

An afternoon session at SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, on November 19, 2008, in San Jose, California wirh standing room only participation

As a first step, CA and VMware have signed an agreement to make CA Data Center Automation Manager interoperable with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed to enable enterprises and cloud service providers to seamlessly provision applications and resources from both corporate data center and service provider clouds. It is intended to help customers test, stage and deploy complex applications within virtual environments, and allow applications hosted on virtualized servers to be operational-ready and able to be monitored and secured to speed deployment.

The joint solution extends CA's strength in delivering leading end-to-end enterprise software change, configuration and release management through CA Software Change Manager and CA Data Center Automation Manager. These products optimize the entire development process through effective collaboration, lifecycle automation, standards enforcement, and configuration audit and control.

VMware Stage Manager leverages VMware Infrastructure to enable IT and application administrators to accelerate release management activities, streamlining the resources and processes required to move a business application through integration, test, and staging and ultimately deploy it into production. VMware Stage Manager also reduces the risks associated with change-related downtime by enabling IT to easily clone entire multi-tier systems, allowing exact replicas of the production environment to be used throughout the release process.

CA Data Center Automation Manager is a key component of CA's cloud management strategy. In September 2008, VMware announced its plans to expand VMware Infrastructure into a comprehensive Virtual Datacenter Operating System. The VDC-OS is intended to allow businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware resources-servers, storage and network-into an aggregated on-premise cloud and, when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional compute capacity.

"Many of our shared enterprise customers have moved beyond using virtualization for server consolidation and cost savings, and are using CA's virtualization management technologies to achieve significant business value," stated Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CA's EITM Group. "With the combination of CA and VMware's management and virtualization technologies, enterprises and cloud providers are able to apply informed automation in real-time to achieve dramatically improved business agility, service quality and cost efficiency."

"Our partnership with CA enables customers to transform their IT operations by deploying VMware technologies across IT disciplines, along with leading management technologies, to drive improved service delivery to the business," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions, VMware. "We look forward to combining the strength of VMware Stage Manager and CA Data Center Automation Manager to enable rapid provisioning of development and production applications for our joint customers."