Something interesting and important is cooking at CA. We got the first whiff of it at CA World a few weeks ago. As far as I know, I was the only analyst there, so I guess this is an analyst scoop of a kind. I was there to give a presentation on SOA and to sign some copies of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies, but because I was there, I got access to CA’s CTO, Al Nugent, and some of his team. So now, I’ve got the goods on CA’s Integration Platform ahead of the rest of the analyst community. But before I provide an outline of it, here’s some background.

CA is trying to reinvent itself and it’s clear that acquiring new “best of breed” management and security products is a big part of its strategy. The list of acquisitions is now growing long and includes; Concord, Control-F1, Cybermation, iLumen, MDY, Netegrity, Niku, Pest Patrol, Qurb, Tiny, Wily and XOSoft. The acquisition activity has been vigorous to say the least, and it is clearly not the old CA acquiring failing products in order to milk the support revenue stream. CA is filling out its product portfolio with a purpose.

The current marketing mantras that Don Friedman (CA’s CMO) has put in the mouths of CA’s evangelists are:

a) Unify and Simplify, and

b) Govern, Manage, Secure

As regards the second marketing mantra, these acquisitions clearly focus on one of the three areas; governance, management and security, so there’s evidence of corporate cohesion in that. But CA’s acquisitions neither unify nor simplify in any meaningful way. So what does? Let’s cut to the chase…

The CA Integration Platform

Al Nugent and his core team at CA have been busy and they’ve built what CA calls an “Integration Platform”. What is it? It is the underlying software infrastructure to integrate the vast variety of management and security products that are necessary to run and protect the huge corporate networks that have grown up over the last decade or so. Furthermore, it is an architecture that, in my opinion, can and will provide the infrastructure that large scale Service Oriented Architectures will demand.

In other words, it is a credible answer to the conundrum that faces all the system management and security vendors, big and small. As it happens, it doesn’t just provide a basis for unification and simplification, but also for extension.

I don’t have the space here to fully describe what CA is producing, but I can sketch it for you quickly. Imagine a distributed capability that resembles the Internet’s Domain Name System (a light-weight software component at every network node) which is either a sensor (detecting what is happening locally in line with “policy”) or an actor (implementing local activity according to “policy”) or both. Now imagine a federated “policy” distribution engine which keeps the sensors and actors fed with policy changes on a publish/subscribe basis, as and when such policy changes occur.

Now think of the whole platform as being stateless, so that there are no synchronous dependencies between any part of it. In other words, every part knows what it has to do and does it according to the messages it receives or local changes of state. Now think of the activity of the actors being only to invoke or direct specific management components such as a provisioning capability or a scheduling capability, or application performance management capability or resource management capability or whatever. Now think of policy as being collections of BPEL statements which can be introduced into the platform at multiple (i.e. federated) points.

So that’s what CA’s Integration platform is, briefly described. It’s a lightweight federated massively scalable policy driven integration capability (so many adjectives all in a row) with no single point of failure. And that means it’s an infrastructure for SOA. Suddenly “Unify and Simplify” makes some sense.

Right now, as far as I know, the CA Integration Platform is unique. Currently, it exists in an only-just-Alpha-incarnation. It is demonstrable, but primitive. Nevertheless it is expected to move into Beta later this year and while CA is not committing to a release date, early next year seems likely.

Rolling Thunder

Members of the development team talk about “Rolling Thunder”. That’s not the code name for the product, it’s the code name for the roll-out. Odd don’t you think—having a code name for a roll out?. Well it is, but in the circumstances, it isn’t.

When the Integration Platform is fully available, CA will roll out its portfolio, product by product, with plug-in support for the Integration Platform. At the same time, vendors of complementary or competitive products will be invited to do the same. The platform is intended to be heterogeneous-vendor-neutral-preserve-your-investment-motherhood-and-apple-pie. It’s my guess that CA won’t charge a dime for the Integration Platform, because the ecosystem it could create could be so lucrative. Whatever it chooses to do, it has, in my view, set the bar very high for the other major management vendors. IBM, HP and BMC are going to have to respond, and quickly.

Rolling thunder? Yes indeed.