I spent part of last week at Marne La Vallée Chessy with CA. Marne La Vallée is conveniently located near to Charles De Gaule airport and it is within driving distance of Chantilly, Chartres, Versaille and that great European capital, Paris. I was surprised to discover that it is also the location of an historical but little known commercial disaster. Apparently many years before the Dot Com era, when backing absurd ideas was une peste effrayante, mais rare, investors watched their money se donner la flamme in the attempt to establish an American parc de loisirs en le coeur de French France. It’s astonishing that anyone believed such une idée aberrante had a chance of success but they surely did. They even completed it and opened it before commercial reality dawned.

Nowadays it is merely a collection of faded and bizarre hotels that are stumbled on by adventurous tourists who stray from the beaten track. But because there is such a preponderance of hotels it is also used by companies to hold conferences. So on the edge of the archaeological ruins of le parc de loisirs, (I can’t remember what’s its called, e-something I think) a healthy trade is carried out by the usual hotel chains. On the day I arrived a Lenovo event of some kind was in full swing and the CA event was in preparation.

I could write quite a lot about the time I spent with CA but I’ll confine myself to two points.

Point one is that CA is assembling a healthy storage software portfolio. It is healthy in the sense that it is relevant, well integrated and, apparently, selling well. It is also set to expand in the coming year. Data storage counts as CEO John Swainson’s first change of direction. When he took the helm he sidelined the storage business, determined to focus on System Management and Security. Following discovery (of commercial facts) and debate, he changed his mind and included storage among the primary focus areas. This has happily coincided with a time when EMC has yet to get its storage software act together and Symantec is suffering a bit of VERITAS indigestion (indigestium veritatum).

Point two is that CA Labs are, I believe, going to become a significant factor in CA’s future evolution. I enjoyed a very long and wide ranging conversation with Peter Matthews of CA Labs which told me, if nothing else, that CA is well aware of most of the critical problems that exist in the management space and how they will need to be solved.

Roughly stated, the general problem is this: If you want to be able to manage a whole resource space such as a network of thousands of servers, you need something that equates to an operating system for the whole space.

This Uber-OS has to have 100% availability and will need to be able to deal with multiple streams of information coming to it from every node. It will have to resolve such information feeds, not just in real-time, but predictively and resolve them with reference to a complex rules-base of SLAs. In other words this is not your father’s OS, but something else. I could say a good deal more but it gets very complex—especially if the whole domain is also changing in real-time, which it will be. If you bump into Peter Matthews, ask him about it.

I left the parc de loisirs knowing more than when I had arrived. (That’s what it was called! E-Urodisney).

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